Austin, TX Photo - The Old Texas General Land Office Building, Now The Texas Capitol Visitor Center, in Austin, Texas

The old Texas General Land Office Building, now the Texas Capitol Visitor Center, in Austin, Texas. The oldest surviving state government office building in the city, it was the first building designed by a university-trained architect (German architect Christoph Conrad Stremme). The building features a dramatic medieval-castle style known as Rundbogenstil, or "rounded arch" around the windows and doors. The exterior walls are limestone rubble smoothed over with stucco and scored to simulate cut stone blocks. The Land Office was completed in 1857 on the southeast corner of the Texas State Capitol grounds. One employee, William Sidney Porter, later became famous as short-story writer O. Henry. Porter worked in the office from 1887 to 1891 and later set several of his stories there. The building functioned as the state's land office building until 1917 when the agency moved to a larger building across the street. From 1919 until 1989, the building housed museums run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.