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Courthouses

The Quarries Behind a Courthouse

The stone in a Texas courthouse of the 1890s was chosen by an architect and delivered by a railroad, and the second fact did more to fix the building than the first.

Subject
Courthouses
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6 minutes
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Rosser Newton
Color photograph of a pale yellow brick courthouse with tall gray columns on its porches, a domed cupola topped by a statue, and a low brick wall along the street under a blue sky with clouds.
The old Harrison County Courthouse in Marshall, Texas, 2014. Carol M. Highsmith, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. No known restrictions on publication.

My first mistake with this record was deciding what one word meant before I had finished reading the paragraph. The San Antonio Daily Light of December 18, 1893, carried a short special dispatch from Fort Worth under the headline Court House Fraud Unearthed. A local man, it said, had set off a sensation by charging that an inferior quality of granite was going into the new Tarrant County courthouse. The Daily Mail had printed his charges, and that day the county commissioners had called him in to tell what he knew. He claimed the stone was of the class the government had condemned in the jetty work at Galveston, and that it was not capital granite, as contracted for. The investigation, the dispatch added, was being held behind closed doors.1

I read capital as a misprint for Capitol, and wrote a note tying the Fort Worth contract to the quarry that supplied the statehouse in Austin. Then I stopped. Capital is also an ordinary word of praise, as in a capital dinner, and read that way the phrase means no more than first class granite. The dispatch does not say which it meant. I had supplied the quarry myself.

That is the record at the center of this essay, and it is worth taking apart the way I would take apart any single document. What it says is narrow: a charge was made, the charge was published, the commissioners heard it, and the hearing was closed. What it was made for is narrower still. It is a paragraph of telegraph news filed for a San Antonio paper, relaying a Fort Worth paper’s story, printed just above a report on a Milwaukee cashier’s trial and an item about a crowd watching a Ferris wheel outside a San Antonio store.1 What it proves is that in the winter of 1893 people in Fort Worth cared enough about where the courthouse stone came from to make a public fight of it. What it cannot prove is whether the charge was true, how the commissioners ruled, or which quarry had shipped the blocks. I have not yet found the Daily Mail story or the commissioners’ minutes that would answer those questions, and the body that heard him is the same court described in the essay on county government after 1876.

The building itself survives in the historical record as the Handbook of Texas describes it: the Tarrant County courthouse of 1893 to 1895, by Gunn and Curtis, the Handbook’s example of the Renaissance Revival courthouse.2 Its clock tower, and what a photograph can and cannot tell about it, is the subject of the companion essay on courthouse clocks.

Why the stone had to travel

The misreading turned out to be useful, because it sent me to the statehouse story, and the statehouse story explains why a Fort Worth taxpayer in 1893 had a name for good granite at all. The Capitol that stands in Austin was paid for with three million acres of Panhandle land set aside by the Constitution of 1876, the document that closed the era covered in the entry on Reconstruction in Texas.3 The plans called for native limestone, but the limestone near Austin carried iron particles that discolored it. The contractor proposed limestone from Bedford, Indiana. The Capitol Board and Governor John Ireland wanted Texas stone, specifically the red granite of Granite Mountain near present Marble Falls, whose owners offered to give the state enough for the building.3

The contractor resisted on cost. On July 25, 1885, he signed a supplementary contract to use the red granite if the state supplied it free, shared the extra cost, furnished convict labor to quarry it and built a narrow gauge railroad from Burnet to the mountain.3 That clause is the whole argument of this essay in one sentence. Stone of that quality was worth nothing to a building project until a line of track reached it.

The Handbook’s account of the Austin and Northwestern gives the scale. Its narrow gauge track between Austin and Burnet opened in May 1882, and the railroad carried all of the Capitol granite from Granite Mountain, nearly 16,000 carloads. Several cars derailed near Brush Creek in Travis County, and blocks of granite can still be found in the streambed. The line was later extended to Marble Falls and converted to standard gauge in the summer of 1891.4 Granite Mountain itself, a pink dome of roughly 180 acres, became the site of the largest quarry of its kind in the United States, and its stone went into the Galveston seawall and state office buildings as well as the Capitol.5

The courthouses of the next generation show the same dependence. The one in the photograph above is the Harrison County courthouse at Marshall, designed by J. Riely Gordon6 and built in 1901 of corn yellow brick and carved Lueders limestone, and its porches carried on colossal columns of pink granite.7 Lueders is a town in Jones County, far to the west of Marshall. It gained Texas Central Railroad service in 1900, and stone quarries were among its early businesses.8 A quarry town that got its rails one year and a county on the other side of the state that built with its stone the next is the pattern in miniature. The same Lueders limestone turns up as the veneer on the 1927 San Augustine County courthouse in deep East Texas.9 The Navarro County courthouse at Corsicana, designed in 1905, used red Burnet granite and buff brick.10

An architectural historian could fairly contest what I think next. For the big Texas courthouses built between the middle 1880s and the First World War, I think the railroad map decided the materials more than the architect did, and the materials decided much of the look. An architect could draw Romanesque arches or Beaux Arts columns in anything, but whether a county in East Texas could have pink granite columns depended on freight. The styles the Handbook sorts these buildings into are covered in the overview of Texas county courthouses, and I would read every entry in that sequence against a railroad map of the same year.

The rule breaks, and I know where. Plenty of counties built with what lay under them. Denton County’s 1896 courthouse used granite, sandstone and locally quarried limestone, and the soft limestone and sandstone kept deteriorating until the exterior masonry had to be restored.11 Hamilton County’s limestone is said to have been quarried locally, and the Historical Commission’s own careful wording is a warning not to state it more firmly.12 When the Fannin County courthouse was restored, the limestone came from a nearby quarry that a family reopened for the purpose.13 Local stone and imported stone sit side by side in the same decade, and I cannot yet say for a given county which one was chosen on merit and which on the freight rate. That is also why a railroad could decide a fight over which town held the county seat as easily as it decided a building’s columns.

What first put me in front of these buildings was the Travis plaque project that my civic work explains, and the companion pieces sit on the courthouse hub. But the habit I bring to them is the one I bring to any record: find out what it was made for before trusting what it seems to say.

The dispatch from Fort Worth is still on my desk, with the word capital circled twice. Capitol or first class, it records a county that believed the source of its stone was a matter of public trust, and a hearing held with the doors shut.

References

  1. San Antonio Daily Light (San Antonio, Tex.), December 18, 1893, page one, Chronicling America, Library of Congress, San Antonio daily light, December 18, 1893. ↩ ↩2

  2. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, County Courthouses. ↩

  3. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Capitol. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Austin and Northwestern Railroad. ↩

  5. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Granite Mountain. ↩

  6. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Gordon, James Riely. ↩

  7. Texas Historical Commission, Harrison County Courthouse. ↩

  8. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Lueders, TX. ↩

  9. Texas Historical Commission, San Augustine County Courthouse. ↩

  10. Texas Historical Commission, Navarro County Courthouse. ↩

  11. Texas Historical Commission, Denton County Courthouse. ↩

  12. Texas Historical Commission, Hamilton County Courthouse. ↩

  13. Texas Historical Commission, Fannin County Courthouse. ↩