Surveying the Capitol Land Reservation in Texas

Published in Southwestern Historical Quarterly • Vol. 129, No. 3 (January 2026), pp. 335–364

The text here is the original submitted manuscript. For the published version, please see Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Abstract

During the closing years of the 1870s, vast areas of public lands owned by the State of Texas remained underutilized and their value unrealized as the state exited the Reconstruction period. With the adoption of the Constitution of 1876, this asset became the focus of state efforts to develop public works. This Constitution provided for the appropriation of 3 million acres of the public domain to fund the construction of a new state Capitol, a story that many Texans know well. A lesser-known aspect of this history entails the controversies that complicated the survey project that initiated the transformation of 3 million acres of state land into the largest ranch in the world. Led by contractor Joseph Theodore "J.T." Munson in 1879 and 1880, the survey of what became the Capitol Land Reservation employed expert surveyors like John S. Summerfield and H. A. Wiley in the Panhandle to produce an intricate record of the vast property. A detailed survey was created, but it attracted intense legal scrutiny as potentially fraudulent practices by the firm of Gunter & Munson in Sherman came to light. More problems emerged in subsequent years as more accurate surveys uncovered significant errors in Munson's survey that affected landowners in the region as late as the 1920s.