In 1845, a British newspaper thought Houston was worth explaining to its readers. The Illustrated London News — one of the most widely read publications in the world at the time — ran a wood engraving with a very specific caption: *City of Houston — The Capitol of Texas.* Not a city in Texas. Not the largest city. The Capitol. Let that sit for a second. London readers in 1845 were being handed this image as their mental picture of Texas governance. A wood engraving, by definition, was a considered editorial choice — someone commissioned an artist, carved the image into a block, ran ink across it, and pressed it into thousands of copies shipped across Britain and beyond. This wasn't a throwaway mention. Houston was being formally introduced to the world as the seat of Texan power. Which makes sense historically, except for the part where it was already wrong. Houston had served as the capital of the Republic of Texas in its early years, but the capital had moved — first to Waterloo, which was then renamed Austin. By 1845, the question of where Texas actually governed itself from was still contested enough that an international newspaper apparently felt confident calling Houston the capitol without anyone stopping them at the press. Or maybe they just didn't know. Maybe the engraving was sourced from older material, or the correspondent filed from incomplete information, or no one in London particularly cared to fact-check the internal geography of a republic that was actively in the process of being annexed by the United States anyway. What's strange and wonderful about this image is what it represents beyond the political confusion: international eyes were on Texas. Not just American eyes, not just neighboring states watching nervously — London. The Illustrated London News had readers from Edinburgh to Calcutta. Someone in a parlor in Manchester saw this engraving and formed their first-ever mental image of what Texas looked like, what it meant, where it was centered. And what they got was Houston. The wood engraving itself — the medium — is worth thinking about too. This was how the world looked before photography could be reliably reproduced in print. An artist rendered Houston from some source, whether firsthand observation, a sketch passed through several hands, or pure imagination guided by description. The Houston in that image may or may not have looked like Houston. It looked like what someone decided Houston should look like for an international audience. We've been arguing about Houston's image ever since.
