One Elected Official, 13 Million Acres, and the Alamo

The oldest agency in Texas government was created to sort out who owned what after a revolution, and it has never stopped growing since.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-07-06

On the night of December 30, 1842, an Austin innkeeper named Angelina Eberly noticed a detachment of men loading wagons behind a squat limestone building on Congress Avenue. President Sam Houston had ordered the government archives of the young Republic of Texas spirited away to Washington-on-the-Brazos, a maneuver Austinites suspected was really an attempt to move the capital itself. Eberly ran to a nearby six-pound cannon, loaded with grapeshot, and fired it into the building. She missed the wagons and blew a hole in the wall of the General Land Office instead. The Archive War that followed ended with Austin's citizens chasing down the wagons and hauling the records back home. The building Eberly shot at is still standing; it now serves as the Texas State Capitol's visitor center. The agency she was defending is still running, and it now manages 13 million acres of land, operates the Alamo, oversees the largest carbon storage lease in the United States, and is administering more than $14.3 billion in federal disaster recovery funding. Most Texans have never heard its full job description.

Born From a Revolution

The Texas General Land Office was established by the Congress of the Republic of Texas on December 22, 1836, less than a year after the Battle of San Jacinto ended the war for independence from Mexico. Its first commissioner, John P. Borden, opened the office in Houston on October 1, 1837, charged by law to "superintend, execute, and perform all acts touching or respecting the public lands of Texas." His first task was almost entirely archival: translating and validating tens of thousands of Spanish and Mexican land grants that predated the revolution, including the roughly 270 titles issued in 1824 to Stephen F. Austin's first colonists, families remembered today as the "Old 300." Those grants alone covered more than 1.5 million acres along the Brazos River, measured in varas, a Spanish unit of length that Texas still uses for state land surveys nearly two centuries later.

What makes the GLO's founding unusual is what happened when Texas joined the United States in 1845. Rather than surrendering its public lands to the federal government in exchange for debt relief, as other territories had done, Texas negotiated to keep them. That single decision is why Texas remains the only state in the country with no federal public land within its borders and complete control over the revenue its own land generates. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that Texas owned the seabed extending three leagues, about 10.35 miles, from its coastline, far more than the three-mile limit granted to other coastal states, the GLO inherited an entire submerged empire along with it. Every acre of that empire, along with the oil, gas, and now carbon storage rights beneath it, still runs through the same agency Borden opened in a rented room in Houston.

The Permanent School Fund Machine

The GLO's core financial engine is the Permanent School Fund, a constitutionally protected account created in 1845 and seeded with a $2 million legislative investment in 1854. Under the Texas Constitution of 1876, the fund became the permanent beneficiary of proceeds from state land sales and leases, meaning that every barrel of oil, cubic foot of gas, or ton of hard mineral extracted from GLO-managed land sends a royalty check to Texas public schools. Since inception, the agency says it has deposited more than $30 billion into the fund, including roughly $3 billion from oil and gas revenue in just the two most recent fiscal years.

That machine picked up an entirely new gear in October 2024, when Commissioner Dawn Buckingham signed a lease with ExxonMobil covering approximately 271,068 acres of submerged state land offshore of Jefferson, Chambers, and Galveston counties. The deal grants ExxonMobil the right to inject carbon dioxide into rock formations one to two miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico, and it is not only the most extensive carbon capture and sequestration transportation and storage lease in Texas history, it is the largest such lease in the United States. Buckingham has since signed additional carbon storage leases, including a partnership with a Repsol-led consortium covering more than 140,000 acres off Corpus Christi, and the School Land Board says six CCS leases combined are projected to generate more than $10 billion for the Permanent School Fund over their 30-year terms. An agency built to sell drilling rights has become the largest single landlord for the emissions its other tenants produce, and the arrangement is now one of the fund's most consequential bets.

From Combat Veterans to the Alamo

The GLO's portfolio extends well past minerals. In 1946, the Texas Legislature passed the Veterans Land Act, creating the Veterans Land Board and authorizing $25 million in bonds so returning World War II soldiers could buy land on favorable terms; by 1951 lawmakers had added another $75 million to expand the program. The board now oversees some of the most extensive state veterans' benefits in the country, including long-term care homes and state cemeteries, and when a veteran defaults on a land loan, the GLO forecloses and resells the tract to other veterans at auction four times a year.

In 2011, the Texas Legislature handed the agency an entirely different kind of asset: the Alamo. The state transferred management of the historic mission from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, its longtime custodian, after allegations of mismanagement, and the GLO has run it ever since, alongside the nonprofit Alamo Trust. That arrangement has proven far more volatile than a typical museum contract. A $400 million-plus redevelopment plan reignited a decades-old fight over the Cenotaph, the 60-foot marble monument to the Alamo's defenders, after planners proposed moving it 500 feet; the backlash was strong enough that Buckingham had the GLO take direct ownership of the monument in 2024, and the state historical commission ultimately blocked the relocation. In November 2025, days after the Alamo Trust's president and CEO Kate Rogers was removed from her post following political criticism of a 2023 academic paper she had written on Indigenous history at the site, the newly restored Cenotaph was rededicated in a public ceremony, with Buckingham telling reporters the redevelopment was "going full steam ahead." The state's oldest land-records agency now also functions, on a rotating basis, as a museum operator, a landlord to a nonprofit trust, and occasionally a referee in academic-freedom disputes.

The Harvey Reckoning

Not every chapter has ended as cleanly. After Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on the Houston area in 2017, killing more than 80 people, Texas received roughly $4.3 billion in federal disaster recovery aid, funds the GLO was responsible for distributing. In 2021, under then-Commissioner George P. Bush, the agency ran a $1 billion competitive grant contest for local governments, and Houston and Harris County, the jurisdiction with the most deaths and property damage from the storm, received none of it. A Houston Chronicle investigation found the money disproportionately went to inland counties with lower storm damage and lower disaster risk. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development opened its own investigation, and in 2022 concluded the allocation had discriminated on the basis of race and national origin, with what it called particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents. A revised $1.2 billion round drew the same conclusion from a Texas Tribune analysis in 2022, and in early 2025 HUD referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice, citing the GLO's "sustained unwillingness" to fix the pattern.

Commissioner Buckingham, who inherited the case, called the allegations "baseless" and "politically motivated," noting that more than a million minority residents, roughly two-thirds of those served, had benefited from the funding regardless of geography. On January 29, 2026, after five years and two presidential administrations, HUD closed the investigation, concluding after reviewing more than 80,000 pages of documents that there was no reasonable cause to find discriminatory intent and calling its own earlier findings "fatally flawed." Whether that closes the underlying debate over how the money was actually distributed, or simply closes the file, is a question Houston officials and housing advocates are still arguing about.

One Office, Many Roles

What ties these threads together is not any single transaction but the shape of the agency itself: a single elected official, the Land Commissioner, sits atop a records office, an oil and gas company, a mortgage lender, a museum operator, a coastal regulator, and now a disaster bank, with almost no requirement that any one of those roles be visible to the public that funds it. The office has launched statewide political careers before, from Jerry Patterson to George P. Bush, and Buckingham's tenure has already stretched the job further than most of her predecessors, from courtroom fights with Washington over LNG exports to a rededicated Cenotaph in San Antonio. Nearly two centuries after Angelina Eberly fired a cannon to keep the state's paperwork in Austin, the paperwork has become one of the largest and least understood balance sheets in Texas government.