The current building is the fourth to serve as the Texas capitol in Austin. The first was a two-room wooden structure at the corner of Eighth and Colorado streets that had housed the government of the Republic of Texas and continued in use after statehood. A limestone replacement went up in 1853 on the site of the present building, but it burned in 1881. A temporary capitol was thrown together across the street at Eleventh and Congress Avenue in 1882, and it too eventually burned down in 1899. The state had already decided to go bigger. Architect Elijah E. Myers designed the Italian Renaissance Revival structure in 1881, and civil engineer Reuben Lindsay Walker oversaw construction from 1882 to 1888, employing as many as a thousand convicts and migrant workers at a time. The cornerstone was laid on March 2, 1885 -- Texas Independence Day -- and the building opened to the public on April 21, 1888, San Jacinto Day, before construction was formally complete.

The original plan called for the building to be clad in limestone quarried from Oatmanville, present-day Oak Hill, about ten miles to the southwest. But the Hill Country limestone had a fatal flaw: its high iron content caused ugly rust stains when exposed to weather. Business partners George W. Lacy, Nimrod L. Norton, and William H. Westfall, owners of Granite Mountain near Marble Falls, offered the state a remarkable gift -- all the sunset-red granite needed to sheathe the building, free of charge. A new 2.3-mile spur of the Austin and Northwestern Railroad was built to transport the stone from Granite Mountain Quarry to the Austin train terminal. The spur had one notorious problem: a bend in the tracks too sharp for the heavy loads, causing trains to occasionally derail and dump their cargo of pink granite along the route. Many of those fallen rocks still sit where they landed, a local curiosity. The project's 900 workers included 86 granite cutters brought from Scotland to shape the stone.

Texas takes the visibility of its capitol personally. In 1931, Austin enacted an ordinance limiting building heights to preserve the capitol's visual preeminence on the skyline. The rule held for three decades until 1962, when developers announced the Westgate Tower, a high-rise residential building to be built adjacent to the capitol grounds. Governor Price Daniel opposed it, and State Representative Henry Grover introduced a bill to condemn the property, which lost in the Texas House by just two votes. The Westgate went up in 1966, followed by the Dobie Center in 1968 and a series of ever-taller downtown bank towers. The state responded in 1983 with legislation defining 30 protected viewing corridors radiating out from the capitol, prohibiting any construction that would break the sight lines. The City of Austin adopted matching rules, so the corridors are protected under both state law and municipal zoning code.

On February 6, 1983, a fire broke out in the apartment of Lieutenant Governor William P. Hobby Jr. inside the capitol. A guest of Hobby's was killed, and four firemen and a policeman were injured. The blaze came dangerously close to destroying the building, which was packed with accumulated archives and framed with exposed cast iron. The state used the extensive rebuilding to modernize the structure. In November 1985, the original Goddess of Liberty statue was lifted from the dome by helicopter. A new aluminum replica, cast from molds of the original zinc statue, was placed on the dome in June 1986 by the Mississippi National Guard, since Texas lacked the lifting capacity for the approximately 3,000-pound figure. The original statue now resides at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. To solve a chronic space shortage, the state built a four-story underground extension beneath the north plaza in 1993, a $75 million project that nearly doubled the capitol's usable square footage. At ground level, the only evidence of this vast subterranean space is a grid of skylights disguised as planter rows and a striking open-air inverted rotunda.

The capitol grounds tell their own stories through a collection of monuments: Terry's Texas Rangers, the Heroes of the Alamo, Hood's Texas Brigade, the Volunteer Firemen, and the Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument, dedicated in 2014. A granite monument bearing the Ten Commandments provoked a legal battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, with the justices ruling 5-4 in Van Orden v. Perry that its display was constitutional. Inside, terrazzo mosaics depict the seals of the six nations that have governed Texas. A comprehensive interior and exterior restoration completed in 1995 cost about $98 million, and in 1997 the park-like grounds received an $8 million renovation. The building that started as a land swap between politicians and ranchers remains the seat of Texas government, its dome topped by the Goddess of Liberty, its sunset-red walls glowing against the Austin sky exactly as the Scottish granite cutters and Texas convict laborers left them.