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Review
 
November 2000
Courthouse
Artist Bill Morgan
By Bill Sanderson from Pleasant Grove
On those sun-baked summer afternoons
only children seem to enjoy, Bill Morgan got hooked on Texas courthouses.
During his boyhood days in Laredo, he'd swing his legs off the
retainer wall around the Webb County Courthouse, listening to prisoners holler
out the jail windows. Shading under the big trees, young Morgan speculated on
another world existing within the columned portals of the courthouse, a far
more curious and exotic life. He didn't know that many years later he would
dedicate himself to illustrating the rich detail of Texas courthouses, and
collecting and writing their histories as well.
Operating from his
rambling, ranch-style home in Sunnyvale, the artist's self-owned Prairie
Publications published five consecutive calendars (1995-1999) featuring his
favorite courthouses and their stories. His recent book Old Friends, published
by Fort Worth's Landmark Press, is a compendium of that previous work---a blend
of historic document, architectural illustration and oral history.
A
former Dallas sportswriter and cartoonist, Morgan discovered that Texas
courthouse stories can loom tall, and that such material fit his prose style:
the trademark broken field writing, always angling for an ironic seam to run
through toward humor's daylight.
Take the Erath County Courthouse
clock in Stephenville, where history revealed a misadventure when a $1.7
million restoration was completed in 1988. Three years later, Morgan reports, a
clock builder visited the town and offered to fix the clock. The courthouse
officials thought the idea absurd; they had already spent money on the
courthouse clock and it worked fine. But no one had noticed that the clock's
numbers were out of sequence on its west face. They read 1,2,3,5,4,6!
Amid the county's excitement over the discovery, a local judge offered a sly --
and fiscally conservative---solution. He observed that every county boasts
something unusual, and the courthouse clock could be theirs.
As Morgan
moves along his suburban backyard fence one afternoon, feeding pellets to
sandpaper-tongued cows grazing in an adjoining field destined for development,
he shares the clock story. The cows crowd up each day when they hear his feed
sack rattle, and you can still see something of the Laredo boy entertaining
himself on those courthouse lawn afternoons. The bovine beggars are not his but
they interest and amuse him.
In the same way, Morgan has fun with his
courthouse illustrations and stories. The giant Texas buildings that house
county officials and records---and sometimes both criminals and peace
officers---are places of great passions, intrigue and turbulent pasts. Morgan
was startled to discover that of 254 Texas county courthouses, at least 110 of
them have erupted in flames at one time or another. Arson was the source of
many fires. "Guys wanted indictments burned, cattle brand registration changed,
or simply wanted to move the courthouse," he says.
For his
illustrations, Morgan's artistic perspective is as random as where he parks his
car on a square or where a park bench is located---the roosts from where he
sketches. He is faithful to the details but not to the perspective, which he
sometimes exaggerates. "I use a little artistic license," he admits. "I might
make the building a little bigger to make the building more heroic."
There is a Zen-like quality to the simple artistic mastery and representation
of these historic old buildings. Maybe it's a mind/eye trick, but Morgan says
it works this way: "You look at the building for a long time and look away.
Then look at it again and see what grabs you."
What "grabs" him is
what Morgan draws and to which other details fall subordinate. "It's sort of
like what a caricature artist does," he notes.
Traveling about Texas,
visiting with passersby on courthouse squares, Morgan unearthed one of the
great unintended consequences of his effort: the stories. The stories created
an historic folk chronicle of the buildings. A passerby might comment, for
example, "My granddaddy hauled this rock to build this courthouse."
There were many such surprises along the way as his calendars became popular
and folks sent him letters. One lady wrote and told of her grandfather's death
constructing the Parker County courthouse in Weatherford and how for many years
afterward the courthouse trim was always painted black in his memory. Hearing
such stories, Morgan realized that his teeth were sunk deep into a Texas mother
lode. "It was almost an oral history project," he says. "There is still great
territorial pride in their buildings."
Morgan begins a drawing by
visiting the local newspaper office to learn what he can, then asking around
for the name of the county's number one historian. The work takes off from
there. His visits in the square connect him with living descendants of those in
the stories. "My biggest enjoyment [in making] the calendars and book," he
says, "was talking to the generation who were old enough to know the generation
that touched 1880 to 1920, the heyday of courthouse construction." As a result,
his book and calendars have brought a touch of history that might never have
been recorded.
Morgan retains a native son's enthusiasm for those
historical details. He tells and retells the story about the old Hood County
courthouse clock in Granbury. It operated akin to a giant grandfather clock,
with heavy weights that required resetting every seven days. A local watch
repairman, J.A. "Jim" Keys, undertook the civic duty of rewinding the clock
after the building was completed in 1891, and he wound it every week until
1932---a 41-year project.
When Jim Keys became too old, his son Jack,
a Fort Worth resident, picked up the standard and drove each week to Granbury
to reset the clock. He continued until his own old age prevented him, whereupon
the commissioners, in the mid-1970s, threw out the old clockworks and installed
an electric clock.
Perhaps only a sense of romantic mystery could fuel
Morgan's artistic drive for such detail, drawing the thousands of bricks in
each courthouse wall and chronicling the histories taken from books and
sidewalk conversations. But Morgan simply says, "It's kind of like eating an
elephant. One bite at a time, it's not so hard."
Bill Sanderson is a Dallas-based
free-lance writer. |
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