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Bill Morgan recalls some of the stories, characters,
incidents, facts, trivia and what-not he picked up during his decade-long
odyssey among the courthouses of Texas, the state that has twice as many
landmark courthouses as its nearest challenger has courthouses of any kind. And
that’s not a Texas brag--it’s just a well-known Texas
fact.
All right,
who ate the pig’s ears?
Dignity, Decorum and Justice Prevailed
In Texas Courthouses
(Except for the Fights, Arson, Thefts and
Occasional Serious Felonies)
By BILL
MORGAN
There’s nowhere
better to get a feel of Texas’ heritage than the nearest
courthouse, whether its’s in the middle of Houston (pop. 1,603,524),
Mentone (pop. 50 estimated) or any of the state’s other 252 county seats.
The first thing that hits you is that the county courthouse is often
magnificent. The next thing that hits you is that the county history is often
scandalous.
Let’s start with the magnificent. Simple arithmetic
proves that Texas has more old courthouses than any other state. Its 254
counties count more than 210 standing current or former courthouses that date
from 1861 to the late 1930s. Georgia has the second-most counties in the USA
with 159. So Texas has 51 more antebellum to pre-World War II courthouses than
the No. 2 state has total courthouses. That’s the end of that argument.
Proving the scandalous part might require a few more details. After
chasing around Texas courthouses since the late 1980s and listening to
descendants of the people who tamed the place, I have details. A sampling of
examples:
How about the dog that ate all the evidence at a theft
trial, while the participants duked it out in a fistfight? Or the bull that
butted down a courthouse? Want to know the names of the horses whose votes
carried more than one election? Incidentally, the horses’ names were
spelled correctly, which is more than you can say about a dozen or so Texas
counties and county seats. And have you heard about the town that won a
county-seat election because it allowed pigs to roam its streets?
Time
out for another Texas brag—the Texas Legislature created more counties
(54) in one day (August 21, 1876) than there are in 19 other entire states.
Back to
courthouses. Did you know that wars were fought over where
courthouses would be built? Or that arson was an effective way to move a county
seat from one town to another—just burn ‘er down and set up shop on
down the road? And a few less-than-scholarly Texans thought a
courthouse-leveling fire would eliminate indictments, get rid of incriminating
cattle brands or make other nagging felonies and misdemeanors go away.
Before going into a few particulars, a disclaimer: these tales merely scratch
the surface. There are enough to fill a book—I know because I filled a
book I called Old Friends: Great Texas Courthouses with these and other equally
improbable tales of a state in its rebellious teen-age years.
Texas
grew up riding horses and herding cattle, so it’s not surprising that farm
and ranch critters played a big role in the building of the ornate courthouses
of the late 1800s.
One that wasn’t so ornate was located in the
old Angelina County seat of Homer, eight miles east of present-day seat Lufkin.
On hot days, court was held under a tree on Isaac Dunagan’s place.
Everybody sat on split-log benches. One steamy summer day a man was on trial
for stealing a neighbor’s pig and butchering it. The trial turned on the
porker’s ears, the only remaining physical evidence. Tempers ran as hot as
the thermometer and a fight broke out. After officers separated the combatants
and restored order, the judge was forced to drop the case: during the confusion
a dog sneaked up to the bench and ate the evidence.
The original Cooke County
log courthouse was built in 1850 and cost $30, which averaged out to ten bucks
a year. It would have lasted longer if Jim Dickson’s bull had stayed home.
A rancher who lived down the street from the courthouse, Dickson kept his breed
bull in a pen behind the house to protect it from rustlers.
One day
heel flies so tormented the bull that he broke through his fence, galloped down
the street and through the open front door of the 16-by-16-foot courthouse.
With his full head of steam, the bull rammed the far wall and brought the
building down around him. Minutes of an emergency commissioners court meeting
on January 15, 1853 stipulate that a new courthouse “shall be built so
strong that Jim Dickson’s bull or no other damn bull can butt it
down.” So far no other damn bull has.
A
Horse, My Courthouse for a Horse
Horses have generally been more
courthouse-friendly—they’ve even helped build a few. Most of the
counties the Legislature created west of the present Interstate 35 weren’t
yet organized in the late 1880s. Once a county’s boundaries were defined
by the Legislature, Texas law required one more step before it could set up
shop—an organizational petition with 135 signatures. Several Plains and
Panhandle counties couldn’t scrape up 135 individuals unless they counted
horses, cows and dogs. So civic leaders counted horses, cows and dogs,
including those under legal voting age.
Haskell County organized in
1859 by signing horses and dogs on its ranches. Lubbock County allegedly made
the number in 1891 when Rollie Burns added the names of the horses on the IOA
Ranch. That same year Castro County’s petition went over the top with the
addition of Billy, Jug and Blue Carter, three hard-working cow ponies on James
Carter’s 7-Up Ranch.
Not all the political skullduggery in West
Texas relied on livestock, though.
Quanah didn’t vote horses in
its 1890 campaign against Margaret for seat of Hardeman County, possibly since
both towns had about the same number of livestock. The Fort Worth & Denver
Railroad ran through Quanah, so the town bestowed legal residency on any man
who had his laundry done there for six weeks. Train crews dropped off their
laundry in Quanah and picked up the well-scrubbed results on the return trip.
After six weeks of getting their laundry done, the trainmen voted in the
county-seat contest.
Predictably, Quanah cleaned up on election day.
In a clear case of pork-barrel politics, Anahuac dislodged Wallisville
as Chambers County seat after the latter held the title for 50 years, thanks to
swine. A Wallisville city ordinance outlawed pigs from roaming the streets.
Anahuac had no such restrictions and it’s been argued ever since that 1907
election that farmers bringing their pork on the hoof to market didn’t
cotton to the restrictions.
If you’ve ever seen the stunning 1900
Harrison County courthouse in Marshall, say a thank-you to pigeons. On June 8,
1899 a maintenance man climbed to the roof of the existing courthouse. It was
his third attempt to scare pigeons away from the ornate showplace by setting
fire to their hangout. Good news and bad news—he scared off the pigeons,
but he burned down the courthouse.
Some purists might say Hopkins
County got into the courthouse business by rustling cattle. But the judge saw
it differently—the Hopkins County judge. Hopkins got along without a
courthouse for the first six years after it organized in 1846. Then someone
discovered that only cattle owned by Texas residents were allowed to graze on
Texas open land. So Judge William S. Todd confiscated 300 head belonging to a
Louisiana man and turned them over to the county. The county in turn sold the
herd for a dollar a head and used the $300 to start building its first
courthouse.
One
Man, One Vote, Maybe Two Votes
Why all the fuss over getting the county-seat
designation? It was a magnet for growth. A town boasting a railroad and a
courthouse was the equivalent of today’s cities with a large airport hub
and a convention center-sports complex.
There’s a good chance
that any county seat you visit today has the courthouse because of a bitter,
divisive election or even despite a bitter, divisive election.
A prime
example of the latter is Newton County. In the late 1800s, Burkeville
successfully challenged incumbent Newton for the seat. Well, not exactly
successfully—Burkeville won the election, 114 votes to 102, but lost,
three votes to zero, where it mattered. The sheriff, county clerk and county
treasurer all lived in Newton and refused to move, even after being fined.
Finally, the Texas Legislature called another election. Newton won this one,
but now it was Burkeville’s turn to be obstinate: officials living there
refused to surrender county records it had accumulated. More intrigue: some
unverified accounts have it that Newton citizens sneaked into Burkeville and
captured them under cover of darkness.
If you drive along U.S. 281
through Blanco, you’ll see a beautifully restored Second Empire building
on the east side of the highway. It was so impressive that it lasted five years
as the courthouse. Johnson City beat bigger, established Blanco in an 1890
election to move the county seat. In his book, The Texas Courthouse Revisited,
author June Rayfield Welch reports that he asked the old courthouse’s then
owner, Mrs. Thurman Roberts, how the smaller town pulled off such an upset. Her
answer: “The dead came out to vote.” Need we be reminded that Johnson
City’s favorite son, Lyndon Baines Johnson, won a 1948 Democratic
senatorial primary election amid charges that the same thing happened in Duvall
County?
A few other examples
of county-seat piracy:
Citizens of Panola County seat Pulaski awoke one
morning in 1848 to find that folks from Carthage had stolen all the county
records during the night. Carthage became a thriving little Northeast Texas
town; Pulaski became a ghost town;
The town of El Paso trounced Ysleta
in an 1884 El Paso County seat election by turning out seven times more votes
than it had voters. Real people voted, too—they happened to be Mexican
citizens crossing the border to work or shop. El Paso vote-getters stood at the
frontera and signed them up as soon as they stepped on U.S. soil;
And
a story long in circulation tells of Henrietta and Cambridge both claiming to
be the Clay County seat through the late 1880s. They supposedly hit on a more
civilized way of settling the issue—they held a mule race with the winner
getting the courthouse.
When it comes to county-seat wars, none hold a
cannon to Lavaca. An election between Hallettsville and Petersburg on June 14,
1852 set off a chain reaction. Loser Petersburg contested the election, then
several of its citizens stormed into the courtroom during the hearing and tore
up the ballots. The presiding judge resigned on the spot. Two more elections
followed with Hallettsville winning both. Petersburg refused to surrender any
county documents, so Hallettsville officials went to get them.
Instead, they got arrested and jailed. When they were released they rallied 200
Hallettsville partisans (one account says 500) and invaded Petersburg to free
the hostage court papers. They found Petersburg folks cooking up a barbecue
feast, a little quick on the draw in celebrating their victory. The surprised
and outnumbered Petersburg revelers fled in disarray and Hallettsville forces
returned as home as conquering heroes, with the spoils of victory in
tow—both the county records and the barbecue.
But arson was hard
to beat for reliable courthouse trashing. When the courthouse wars heated up,
so did a lot of courthouses.
Rivalries
& Courthouses Warmed Up
I counted 106 Texas courthouses destroyed or
badly damaged by fire from the first in 1848 to the latest in 2001. Ironically,
those courthouses were in Jasper and Newton Counties, respectively, Southeast
Texas neighbors that are almost geographically identical and are named for
Revolutionary War heroes and friends John Newton and William Jasper. The two
Yankee soldiers enjoyed such celebrity that 60 counties and cities around the
country are named for them—usually a town being named for one and its
county for the other.
If 106 courthouse fires in 254 counties sounds
excessive, it’s worse than it sounds. Texas had as few as 24 counties and
not more than 150 during most of those fires. Too, it had frame buildings, open
fireplaces, volunteer fire departments with horse-driven wagons and,
eventually, uncertain electric wiring. All played parts in the holocausts
visited on those 106 courthouses, along with arsonists.
The time line
on the fires indicates the intricate stone buildings weren’t just for
looks. After 78 courthouses suffered varying degrees of fire damage in the last
52 years of the Nineteenth Century, only 27 had fires in the Twentieth. Trace
the improvement directly to the granite, limestone, sandstone and marble that
came into fashion in the late 1800s—the era that architectural historians
refer to by the jaw-breaking title of “The Golden Age of Texas Courthouse
Architecture.”
So while stone structures beat the blazes around
town squares, at least six courthouse fires were definitely arson. My guess is
that six is a conservative number.
Not all of the intentional fires
were political in nature, ‘though moving the county seat was an appealing
option in several cases.
Which brings us to my favorite arson-tinged story
in Texas courthouse lore. Have you ever heard of Gus Hooks? No? That
doesn’t prove you’re a poor student of Texas history, but it does
prove that you weren’t a Hardin County lawman in the 1870s. In addition to
his attention-getting antics around the sheriff’s office, Gus was the
acknowledged fastest runner in Hardin County.
The courthouse at Hardin
burned one night after Gus was spotted in the neighborhood. Like everybody else
in town, the sheriff immediately thought of Gus. He saddled up and galloped the
five miles to the Hooks’ place in the Big Thicket, where he found Gus
already in bed and asleep. Fast asleep. That discovery led the folks in Hardin
to a couple of conclusions—a few figured that maybe Gus didn’t do it
after all, a larger consensus was that the sheriff needed a faster horse.
Whatever the cause of the fire in Hardin, Kountze became the county
seat and has held onto it ever since.
I don’t know about you, but
I get a warm feeling when I picture Gus Hooks sprinting through the pines and
bois d’ arcs in the dark of night, his backside reflecting a big fire back
down the road in Hardin.
Several courthouses survived fires lit in
hopes of destroying indictments or cattle brands. In Texas, cattle brands are
registered by county rather than statewide, so you have to go to the courthouse
to identify someone’s brand—or to destroy any trace of it, in case
you’re heading in the opposite direction with a herd of rustled Herefords.
One of the most
persistent alleged torchers was a close friend of the infamous
bad guy, Sam Bass. Denton’s picturesque, if not fireproof, courthouse
burned in 1875. County officials were sure Sam’s pal lit the fire in an
attempt to destroy an indictment, but they didn’t have any proof to
present in court. County records were moved to a church until a new courthouse
could be built. When the church burned, too, they collared the highly motivated
arsonist. Both he and the Denton courthouse fires came to an abrupt, welcomed
end.
Anderson County once boasted a tall, graceful courthouse designed
by the famed Wesley Clarke Dodson. It lasted just 26 years, then fell victim to
arsonists in 1912. John Ballard McDonald, a former Anderson County judge, civic
leader and courthouse pigeon fighter, explained, “A young guy was indicted
for something and a pal of his down at the pool hall convinced him they could
burn down the courthouse and destroy the indictment. It was bad
advice—they burned down the courthouse, but they didn’t destroy the
indictment."
What’s
in a Name, Poor Spelling?
IF the clerks who filled in indictments had the
spelling skills of early Texas Legislatures, all those indictments would have
been thrown out on technicalities. Remember that red-letter day of August 21,
1876 when Texas named 56 new counties? It had a downside—neither the
Legislature nor the residents of the new counties necessarily knew or had even
heard of the people for whom the counties were named.
A second factor
figures in the misspelling bee: several names were taken from military records,
and we know that those things have been getting fouled up since long before the
Pharaoh’s lead charioteer figured he could outrun the Red Sea.
So
it’s probably more surprising that more names weren’t mangled in the
christenings. Here are some that were:
Motley (one “t”)
County is named for Battle of San Jacinto casualty Dr. Junius William Mottley
(two “t’s”);
Randall (two “l's”) is named for
Horace Randal (one “l”), a Texas and Confederate general killed at
Jenkins Ferry.
Three counties are named or misnamed for Alamo
defenders—Dickens County is likely named for a man whose name is on the
records as James R. Demkins, James R. Dimpkins, and J. Dickens; Lynn County
honors an Alamo defender whose name was recorded as both Linn and Lynn; and
Kimble County’s namesake was listed as both George C. Kimball and George
C. Kimble.
Phillip Dimmitt and James Collinsworth are united in two
ways in Texas history—both took part in capturing Goliad and both had
counties misnamed for them (Dimmit, one “t” and Collingsworth, a
“g” added);
Uvalde gets a double whammy. Both the county and
its seat were at least consistently misspelled, with the “g” changed
to “v” in honoring Captain Juan de Ugalde, an Eighteenth Century
Spanish soldier, politician and Indian fighter.
And perhaps the
strangest misspelling of all—Hallettsville, the seat of Lavaca County, was
built on land donated by the widow of John Hallet (one “t”). Margaret
Hallet lived on for several decades in the town that almost bore her name.
There’s no record that she ever called the mistake to anyone’s
attention, much less that it bothered her.
Look a little closer and a
misspelled name doesn’t seem to be such a big deal. The real downside to
having a Texas county named for you is the price you paid for the honor. I
figured 207 of the 254 counties are named for people, all the way from A
(Kenneth Lewis Anderson, vice president of the Republic of Texas) to Z (Lorenzo
de Zavala, a political and military leader in the Texas Revolution). And about
two-thirds of them died violent deaths.
One unforgettable example:
Antonio Zapata, a rancher and politician along what would become the
Texas-Mexican border, became a Federalist colonel in the Mexican Civil War.
Centralists captured and killed him, then severed his head and paraded it
around the plaza of his hometown of Guerrero, just across the Rio Grande from
the future site of the county and town named for him.
Still, getting a
county named for you was occasionally easier than keeping it. If the honoree
fell into political disfavor, the Legislature renamed the county. Congressmen
hailed as heroes for helping Texas become the 28th state on December 19, 1845
became persona non grata little more than a decade later when they showed up on
the Yankee side of the Civil War.
Cass County was named for Michigan
Senator Lewis Cass, who championed Texas’ bid for statehood. When he
became the enemy the county changed its name to Davis in honor of the
Confederate president. Then the Reconstruction government restored the Cass
name. Jefferson Davis came out ahead, too, getting both a county and county
seat named for him in Big Bend country.
Walker County had it much
simpler. It was originally named for Robert J. Walker, a Mississippi
congressman who introduced legislation to annex Texas into the Union. Then the
Civil War came along and Walker became an Unionist. The Legislature easily
solved that problem: it decreed that from now on Walker County be named for
Texas Ranger Captain Samuel H. Walker. Let’s see ‘em pull that trick
with Red River or Val Verde counties.
My favorite story about
county seat names doesn’t involve misspelling, political patronage,
pioneer families, none of the usual standards. It happened this way out close
to the geographic center of the Panhandle:
A Fort Worth & Denver
steam engine stopped at a small town to take on water. The engineer hailed a
passing cowboy and asked the name of the town. The cowboy said that was the
community’s most pertinent question, because city fathers couldn’t
agree on one. “Why not name it for me?” the engineer asked. Why not?
agreed the cowboy, who passed the engineer’s name and suggestion along to
the decision-makers.
The train engineer never lived in that little
Panhandle town, but he made arrangements to be buried there. Railroad engineer
Claude Ayers’ grave is in the cemetery at Claude, Texas, the seat of
Armstrong County and the town that took his name.
Artists
in Brick, Stone and Mortar
When it came to names, Texas
attracted some of the biggest among the country’s Nineteenth Century
architects, the men whose work inspired that less-than-modest label “The
Golden Age of Texas Courthouse Architecture.” Designers spread out across
Texas quicker than the railroads in the last quarter of that century.
Courthouses were evolving into the counties’ socio-economic bell cow and
every politician and civic leader wanted a defining landmark. They usually got
what they wanted.
Weekdays under sprouting canopies of oak, elm and
pecan trees, vest-pocket entrepreneurs haggled over the price of mules and old
men in overalls haggled over the tally in domino games. Come Saturday, farmers
and their families streamed in from around the county. They maneuvered their
wagons to parking spots around the square, shopped at the mercantile and
lamented the sorry state of crop prices. Their kids romped on the courthouse
lawn, darting between veterans of the Mexican, Civil or Spanish-American Wars
as they swapped stories.
The men who designed these landmarks began
arriving in the 1870s. In the next quarter century they would cement
reputations that grow larger with the passing decades.
The first wave
included brothers from Cleveland, Ohio who practiced their genius in Central
and West Texas. Between them, F.E. and Oscar Ruffini built 14 courthouses, five
still standing. The Concho County courthouse at Paint Rock carries the mark of
both: F.E. died after completing the design and Oscar supervised the
construction that was completed in 1886.
Oscar’s work impressed
generations of University of Texas students, even if only a handful of them
knew his name: he designed the “Old Main” administration building
that remained a campus landmark until its demolition in 1953. Courthouses
weren’t the only architectural landmarks that gave way to the post-World
War II statewide facelift.
Alfred Giles was among the busiest of the
early courthouse architects, which helped pay the cost of his move from his
native England after he studied at London’s King College. He also
contributed to confusion over who designed what in those days. For most of the
last century he was credited with creating the plans for the courthouses of
Brooks (Falfurrias), Gillespie (Fredericksburg), Kendall (Boerne), Live Oak
(George West), Presidio (Marfa), Webb (Laredo), Wilson (Floresville), Caldwell
(Lockhart) and Goliad (Goliad) Counties.
As it turned out, the latter
two emerged from a different drawing board.
The Caldwell and Goliad
buildings are identical—in more ways than one. While Giles was almost
unanimously credited with designing both, he wasn’t the architect of
either. David Fulp, creator of the Texas Courthouse Trail web site and a
serious student of courthouses, pointed out to me that in later years Giles was
careful to claim the buildings as products of his firm, rather than of his own
endeavors.
And that claim could come under challenge, too. Henri E.M.
Guidon spent two stretches working for the Giles firm and designed the Caldwell
building in between those career stops. After he returned to Giles’ group,
Guidon’s Caldwell plans were sold to Goliad County commissioners. So to
get technical about it, neither building was designed by a then-current member
of Alfred Giles’ firm.
Like the credits, the buildings were
identical in their beginnings and are again after six decades presenting
markedly different façades. A hurricane in 1942 blew away Goliad’s
clock tower and corner turrets. The building kept its flattop look until a
complete restoration in 2002 returned to it the graceful corner turrets and
clocktower.
An interesting aside: neither the Caldwell nor the Goliad
cornerstones list an architect among the county judges, county commissioners,
contractors, et.al. who are traditionally recognized for their roles in the
building process..
An even more interesting aside, at least for the
Englishman: on a trip from San Antonio to Fredericksburg to work on his
Gillespie County courthouse, Giles was an unfortunate passenger on a stagecoach
that got ambushed. He was relieved of his cash.
Despite that rocky
ride, Alfred Giles and a few other architects sailed smoothly through “The
Golden Age” by monopolizing the flood of courthouse commissions.
If architects gave Texas monumental county digs to brag on, in return
they got steady work and star treatment from even before "The Golden Age" up
through most of the first half of the 20st Century. Among those who kept the
torch burning through those 70 years of memorable courthouses were Henry T.
Phelps, Herbert Voelcker and his architectural firm, Elmore George Withers and
Wyatt C. Hedrick.
Still, the names that stand out from that celebrated
roster of Texas courthouse designers from the 1870s to the 1930s are Wesley
Clarke Dodson and his boy-genius protégé-turned-rival from West
Virginia, James Riely Gordon, along with Giles and Eugene Thomas Heiner
In one 14-year span, Dodson designed 13 Texas courthouses, seven
still-standing—Coryell (Gatesville), Denton (Denton), Fannin (Bonham),
Hill (Hillsboro), Hood (Granbury), Lampasas (Lampasas) and Parker
(Weatherford).
Six of those seven were voted among the top 24 in my
1999 poll of Texas’ favorite courthouses and four are among the 12
courthouses in my print series. The seventh Dodson courthouse in that 14-year
span is in Fannin County at Bonham. It slipped from a classical to an average
courthouse by degrees. A fire in 1929 took out the tower, gable and roof. The
entire building was bricked over in 1965, successfully entombing a Dodson
masterpiece inside a brick façade that gives it the originality and
appeal of a post-World War II bank or dentist’s office.
Gordon’s meteoric career took off in 1891 when at age 28 he designed the
Fayette County courthouse at LaGrange. He spent little more than a decade in
Texas before moving to New York, but it was a dazzling decade. Twelve of his
courthouses monopolized my poll of people who have visited all 254 courthouses.
Five Gordon designs were named in the top ten, seven in the top 20 and the
worst finish among his 12 Texas buildings was 35th. When Gordon died in 1937,
The New York Times credited him with designing 72 courthouses in Texas and
Midwest states, along with the Arizona state capital.
One of my most memorable
visits was to a Gordon building, the spectacular 1892 Victoria
County courthouse. I couldn’t quite make out an intricate detail, so I
cautiously stepped out in the middle of Constitution Street, planted my feet on
the yellow line and trusted that no vehicle would stray out of its lane as I
began sketching.
I became aware that something was crowding up close
to my back. I turned and faced a hard-worked pickup truck stopped in the middle
of the street. I turned all the way around and was almost nose to nose with its
driver, an elderly man in work khakis.
He grinned, nodded toward the
courthouse and asked me, “Ain’t that the ugliest son of a b---- you
ever seen?”
We agreed that it really wasn’t. Then we
leisurely traded opinions on the nooks and crannies, colors and contours of the
Gordon masterpiece for a couple minutes as his little side-boarded Chevy
blocked the only traffic lane on that side of the street. Across the center
stripe, I did imitations of a bullfighter’s paso dobles as cars slipped
past in understanding concession to our street seminar.
Apparently,
folks of Victoria County are used to their courthouse stopping traffic.
James Riely Gordon knew how to close a deal, too. A usual procedure in
the courthouse-building boom of the l880-1910 era saw county commissioners send
out word that they were conducting a competition for their new courthouse.
Architects would present their designs and commissioners chose among them.
Comal County officials called on Gordon in nearby San Antonio to help
them set the rules for their competition. Gordon visited the commissioners and
suggested that instead of a competition, they travel around and look over
standing courthouses, then choose the architect whose work they most admired.
And, of course, a few of his were just a few miles away—the Bexar
courthouse 25 miles south, Lee’s almost-new courthouse 85 miles to the
northeast, Fayette’s just 20 miles south of Lee’s, Ellis’s about
250 miles north, and so on.
The Comal County commissioners got an
idea—they commissioned Gordon to build them a near duplicate of the Lee
County courthouse, and they didn’t have to weigh all those plans and
interview all those architects their competition would attract.
They
Don’t Build ‘em Like They Used To
One reason courthouses inspire such
loyalty these days is that the old ones are truly survivors. For
that decade after World War II, and beyond in a few cases, courthouses might
have led our endangered-species list.
First, there was that arson
business in the late 1800s and early 1900s, then the post-war face-lift, where
historic courthouses were reduced to rubble to make room for concrete and glass
boxes. We lost some landmarks that can never be replaced, but those dark days
produced a few silver linings.
We learned a couple of things in that
building frenzy—first, you don’t get “overs” once you
demolish something irreplaceable and, second, it inspired preservationists to
spring up like Minute Men when local architectural treasures are threatened.
These citizen-soldiers learned to overcome quickly and effectively in the last
half of the Twentieth Century. By my count, they saved more than a dozen old
courthouses from the wrecking ball of “progressive” town planning.
And I’ll bet I missed a bunch of other trench wars won in quieter battles
by the good guys.
Thanks,
preservationists. The state owes you one because they don’t
build ‘em like they used to, even though our 21st Century designers and
craftsmen have learned to rebuild ‘em like they used to.
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