By Mike Norman
mnorman@star-telegram.com
There's not a place in Texas I could be prouder of than the Governor's Mansion. Now it's been renovated, expanded and restored after some idiot tossed a Molotov cocktail on the front porch and nearly destroyed it in 2008.
Gov. Rick Perry and first lady Anita Perry proclaimed the $25 million restoration project complete Wednesday, and they'll move back in this month.
The governor's website (
www.governor.state.tx.us) says public tours will resume soon, so everyone who has the chance should take a look.
To me, the mansion symbolizes the history of my native state like no other place.
The Capitol nearby is pretty cool, too, for a public-policy nerd like me. But even it doesn't have the earthy, real-life history feel of the mansion.
The Alamo is iconic. The other historic missions around San Antonio and at Goliad transport my mind back centuries to what life was like for early Texans.
Fort Davis evokes thoughts of "Buffalo Soldiers," native Americans and the Old West.
Even standing on the beach at Padre Island makes me think of Spanish explorers as they first set foot on what to them was a new world.
But those places represent mostly single points in time. The mansion wraps many historic moments into one package.
It's more than just a place where Texas governors, their families and their pets have lived since Elisha and Lucadia Pease became its first occupants, in 1856 -- just 11 years after our republic became a state.
It's been a focal point of the crucial decisions and important events that shaped those governors' legacies and built Texas.
For a timeline and slide show on the mansion and its history, check out another page on the governor's website,
www.governor.state.tx.us/mansion/timeline.
Many of the important events at the mansion happened in the times leading up to, during and immediately after the Civil War.
It was on the mansion's wide porch that Sam Houston contemplated his principled stand against succession and putting Texas in the Confederacy.
He was forced from office because of that stand.
One of the most prized pieces of furniture in the mansion is Houston's mahogany four-poster bed, in a second-floor bedroom at the front of the house.
I was there once with a group of news people and opinion writers for a meeting with Perry, back a few years ago when he still cared what news people and opinion writers thought about what he did.
The governor took us upstairs to admire the bed, which was made extra long to accommodate the 6-foot-2-inch Houston.
I'm a couple of inches taller than that, and as we stood there that day, Perry invited me to lie on the bed and experience just how long it is.
I only stared at him, dumbfounded. I couldn't and still can't picture myself lying on Sam Houston's bed.
The governor probably thought I was an idiot. It wouldn't be the last time he thought that.
The mansion has been renovated many times. After all, in the beginning it didn't even have running water.
Over the years it has fallen into disrepair, been infested with rats, even let loose a 24-pound slab of ceiling plaster that almost landed on Gov. Price Daniel.
The Legislature has always provided the money to build it back up again.
This is the closest it has come to being lost entirely. Fortunately, most of the building was saved from the fire.
But after four years, state troopers have been unable to catch the arsonist or at least unable to assemble enough evidence to make an arrest.
For the sake of Texas history, I wish they had done a better job and he'd been brought to justice by now. I'm sure the troopers wish the same.
Mike Norman is editorial director of the Star-Telegram/Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County. 817-390-7830Twitter: @mnorman9
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