Austin Museum of Art - Clara Driscoll

Clara Driscoll

Known as "The Savior of the Alamo", Clara Driscoll was born on April 2, 1881, in St. Mary's, Texas, on Copano Bay, to wealthy ranchers Robert and Julia Fox Driscoll.

In 1903, she paid the thousands of dollars necessary to prevent the sale of the Alamo convent to a hotel, earning her the title, "Savior of the Alamo". Until then, the only Alamo property owned by the state was the mission church acquired in 1883. She was reimbursed by the Texas Legislature in 1905 and the entire Alamo property was given over to the safekeeping of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

In 1906, Driscoll married editor and publisher of the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, Hal Sevier. The couple purchased the Laguna Gloria property in 1914, because it reminded them of Lake Como in Italy where they had honeymooned a few years earlier. In 1916 they built a home on the land, designed by San Antonio architect Harvey L. Page. They named it Laguna Gloria in part after one of her family's ranches in Duval County, "La Gloria". The site's proximity to water is most likely the reason they referred to it as a lagoon. In 1926, Driscoll reflected on the site:

I have struggled to make this little home site...into a passably presentable garden of lawns and shrubs and flowers, intersected by paths and steps, with...glimpses and balustrades, and a few oil jars of ancient and accepted design. I have placed in...a proper setting a number of really beautiful and graceful statues which I was fortunate enough to obtain from one of the oldest and finest gardens in old Italy; this to give an Old World touch to an incomparably beautiful Texas landscape and to contribute a little dignity and formality to the riotous caprices of this violet-crowned vale.