Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

35. County Courthouses

✥ 35 ✥ County Courthouses Pro babl y because I grew up in Fort Worth, county courthouses have always fascinated me. In fact, I will admit to being a courthouse freak; I will drive miles out of the way to see a really good courthouse. Fort Worth does not have just a good courthouse ; it has a superb one, a vast red granite pile topped by a two hundred-foot clock tower, which when I was in high school was topped in turn by a metal-and-neon American flag. The courthouse sits on a bluff above the Trinity River at the head of Main Street, and it dominates that street even from the railroad station fourteen blocks away. For more than half a century it said to arriving passengers, “You are stepping off the train in no mean city.” When my father was in high school a human fly advertising a soft drink called Satanet spent a Saturday afternoon climbing the clock tower while a crowd of several thousand people held their collective breath in the street below. I have never been able to look at the building without seeing that figure clinging to the tower, dressed, as my father recalled, in a red devil suit. The Fort Worth courthouse was built in 1895 and is a fine example of what courthouse aficionados call the Golden Age of Texas courthouse architecture: ornate, richly embellished, and expensive (it cost $420,000, which was a small fortune in 1895). The first Texas courthouses, back in the days of the Republic, were log cabins or, sometimes, just big trees like the one Judge Robert McAlpin (Three-Legged Willie) Williamson held court under in Columbus in 1837. Log cabin courthouses had certain flaws. Texas courthouse artist Bill Morgan likes to tell about the first log Cooke County courthouse at Gainesville, which was built in 1850 ✥ 137 and lasted only three years. It was destroyed when a bull belonging to a local man called Jim Dickson broke out of his nearby pen and charged through the open front door, slamming into the opposite wall and bringing the whole structure down around him like so many toothpicks. According to Morgan, the minutes of the next county commissioners’ court meeting stipulated that a new courthouse “shall be built so strong that Jim Dickson’s bull or no other damn bull can butt it down.” The next generation of Texas courthouses, those built in the 1850s and ’60s, were generally bull-proof frame or brick buildings in the Greek Revival style with white columns out front, modeled on courthouses further east. But as Texas counties grew rich on cotton and cattle in the 1880s and ’90s, these courthouses suddenly seemed shabby and old-fashioned, and they were replaced with the Golden Age courthouses. Romanesque and Renaissance Revival wedding cakes with towers and cupolas and mansard roofs and rusticated arches, and all of the exuberant paraphernalia of late Victorian architecture, an architecture that perfectly expressed the period of rampant economic growth that Mark Twain called “The Great Barbecue.” These are the courthouses that I love. The Marfa courthouse is a perfect example of this style. When it was built in 1886, Presidio County was the largest county in the United States, with twelve thousand square miles (but fewer than three thousand people), and the county commissioners wanted a courthouse that would not only reflect that grandeur but would assert Marfa’s superiority over Fort Davis, whose run-down adobe courthouse was one of the arguments for moving the Presidio County seat to Marfa the previous year. Although the architect of record was James H. Britton, the courthouse was probably designed by San Antonian Alfred Giles, who designed eight other Texas courthouses built in the 1880s and ’90s, as well as banks and public buildings all over Texas and northern Mexico. Giles produced a courthouse that could be seen for miles across the prairie. Giles was one of several Texas architects who specialized in 138 ✥ courthouses in those years. Another was Wesley Clark Dodson of Waco, whose cluster of Second Empire courthouses in Weatherford, Denton, Granbury, and Hillsboro were the destinations of my earliest courthouse expeditions from Fort Worth in the late 1950s. The most prolific courthouse architect was Dodson’s protégée James Riely Gordon, who built eighteen, twelve of which are still standing. The best known are his pink granite and red sandstone confection built in...