Land for Sale Texas Cheap
Land for Sale Texas Cheap! Those five words were echoed throughout the United States by settlers, ranchers, farmers, and land speculators who were rushing to Texas in the middle of the 19th Century. In 1846, the Republic of Texas had just joined the Union as the 28th state, after winning its independence from Mexico in 1836.
Texas always wanted the best and biggest of everything. So when Austin was chosen as the state capital in the 1870s, its citizens decided to build the largest statehouse in the Union, even taller than the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The problem, however, was how to scrape together enough money to erect this edifice.
Luckily, the United States government was so anxious to include Texas as a state that the problem was inadvertently solved by the terms of the treaty that brought Texas into the Union. The terms accorded Texas something no other territory was offered, namely the right to retain all of its public lands. Thus, while the new state had very little money, it did have millions of acres of wide-open prairie land.
The creative idea the Texas politicians came up with was to finance their new statehouse by paying for it in land instead of cash. So all they had to do was find a willing contractor. Then along came a syndicate headed by John Farwell, from Chicago. In return for constructing the new State Capitol, the Farwell Syndicate was given three million acres of land in the Texas Panhandle.
Neither the Texas politicians nor the Farwell Syndicate were overjoyed with the end results of the bargain. The statehouse suffered from shabby construction and had to be renovated several times before it was ready for occupancy. And despite Herculean efforts to market land for sale Texas cheap throughout the United States and Europe, there were very few buyers and the Farwell Syndicate almost went bankrupt.
Today, of course, the Texas State Capitol is a beautiful Italian Renaissance-style building of great historical significance. And the three million acres of land for sale Texas cheap is worth a few billion dollars!