The Courthouses of Buckingham County: Jefferson and Beyond

The Courthouses of Buckingham County: Jefferson and Beyond DELOS D. HUGHES T he history of courthouse building in Virginia's Buckingham County comprises three related stories. The most important is that of Thomas Jefferson as the author of one of its courthouse proposals. New evidence about the Jefferson courthouse has recently been uncovered in the ground at Buckingham. The discoveries there, and an analysis of all known documents relating to that courthouse, allow a reconstruction of what the building was like and show that it does not match the only plan of a courthouse in the Jefferson collection of drawings. The struggle to build the structure in the early r8zos and to replace it in the r87os is a significant secondary story illustrating the vagaries of the design process. A third story developed in the twentieth century as historians resurrected Jefferson's Buckingham legacy and began to sort out their understanding of his courthouse plan drawing. Courthouse building in Buckingham County typifies the experience of most counties of similar age, but it is atypical in its connection with Thomas Jefferson. Only two other counties, both also in Virginia, claim Jefferson courthouses. One of those buildings still stands today in Charlotte County. Botetourt County claims to have once had another, but no one can verifY the claim and it now seems dubious.' Jefferson's Buckingham County Courthouse burned more than a century and a quarter ago. Not surprisingly, however, it still intrigues scholars and history buffs, as any building associated with Jefferson does. Architectural historians in particular find the challenge of recreating a disappeared Jefferson building from surviving bits of information hard to resist. The Buckingham County justices' decision in the summer of r82r to build a new courthouse, was only one episode, though an important one, in a long sequence of events and decisions. This history underscores how singular a symbol a community's courthouse can be. Lamentably, courthouses and courthouse building no longer evoke a community's responses as they did in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century when courthouses and courthouse building were signal features of American communal life. Jefferson's part in it made Buckingham's experience more vivid than the norm, yet it was substantially similar to that of most American counties.2 Buckingham's First Permanent Courthouse The Virginia Legislature organized Buckingham County in q6r. Official records of the first sessions of the County Court did not survive a fire that destroyed both courthouse and clerk's office in r869. Early courts of most Virginia counties sat at a convenient house or inn until they could build a first courthouse, ordinarily a small log or frame structure. The Buckingham Court must have been meeting in a building like that in 1777 when its commissioners advertised their intention to build a new, more permanent courthouse.3 The date of their decision is surprising, for the late r77os were war years in Virginia. Though Buckingham County was not apt to be at the center of military activity, neither was it on the distant frontier. Wartime economic uncertainty, however, did not induce caution or postponement in the decision makers of Buckingham County; their new building project was not grand but it was substantial. The commissioners advised potential undertakers that they wanted a building ARRIS DELOS D. HUGHES ~ ~ ?l lllhdJII Fig. I. (top) Plan ofJames City County Courthouse, Williamsburg, Virginia, I770. (Carl Lounsbury) (bottom) Plan oJBuckingham County Courthouse, Maysville (now Buckingham), Virginia (I777). (Conjectural drawing by Carriefaxon) of brick, a central courtroom block 20 feet wide and 32 feet deep, flanked by two smaller jury rooms, each 20 by rs feet, giving aT-shape with a so-foot-long front. For decoration, they wished their courthouse to have "a Modillon [sic] Cornice to the Eaves." If the undertaker built according to the advertisement , the Buckingham County Court would next have sat in an entirely conventional colonial Virginia courthouse, typical for the day and in no manner inferior to the courthouses of neighboring counties. East of Buckingham County, a T-plan county courthouse would probably have had an arcaded loggia across its front, although not all of them did. The advertised Buckingham design had no arcade; it would...