On Oct. 17, 1839, Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, and his cabinet arrived in the new capital city of Austin. Lamar had appointed Edwin Waller to lay out the new capital at the site of the community of Waterloo, on what was then the Indian frontier, as the first step in a grand scheme to extend the republic all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Just a few years earlier, Lamar selected Waterloo to become the new capital while overlooking buffalo from a promontory on the Blackland Prairie — on land that is now part of Pioneer Farms.