Clara Driscoll

Clara Driscoll was born in 1881 near present-day Bayside into a wealthy South Texas ranching and business family and was educated in Texas, New York and France. After returning home she became concerned about the condition and commercial future of the Alamo's Long Barrack. Adina De Zavala and DRT members had begun organizing and fundraising to purchase the property; when roughly $65,000 remained on the $75,000 price, Driscoll supplied the money. The property was later deeded to the State of Texas, which reimbursed her, and she continued to invest in the Alamo complex.

Driscoll and De Zavala eventually split over the desired form of preservation, with Driscoll favoring a memorial treatment different from De Zavala's campaign to preserve the Long Barrack as a surviving mission-era structure. Driscoll's public career later expanded into Democratic Party leadership, the Texas Centennial, arts patronage and philanthropy. She donated her Austin estate Laguna Gloria to the Texas Fine Arts Association and, at her death in 1945, left most of her fortune to create the foundation behind a children's hospital in Corpus Christi.

Driscoll's nickname 'Savior of the Alamo' reflects the extraordinary importance of her money at a moment when preservationists otherwise lacked the capital to secure the Long Barrack property. But the title can obscure the organizing already done by De Zavala and other DRT members, so the profile treats the acquisition as collaborative rather than solitary.

Her later career also shows how early Texas preservation overlapped with elite philanthropy, party politics and cultural institution building. The Alamo was the most famous cause, but Laguna Gloria, Centennial work and the medical foundation in Corpus Christi make Driscoll a broader civic figure than a single-site preservation story suggests.