Texas County Courthouses

Texas county courthouses are the public buildings in which each Texas county holds its courts and conducts its government. The Texas Historical Commission offers courthouse training and technical assistance to all 254 of the state’s counties,¹ and under Texas law every county must provide what the Handbook of Texas quotes as a “convenient building for holding courts.”² The typical site is a public square in the county seat, often donated by the founders of the town for public buildings.²

Inside, the building serves two masters. It houses the state’s district courts and the county court, and it is the seat of the commissioners court, the elected body led by the county judge that manages the county’s affairs.² How that body was organized after 1876 is explained in a study of county government after 1876. Holding the courthouse made a town more important than its neighbors, so rival towns fought over the honor; the Handbook calls these contests county seat wars and says they were frequent while Texas was being settled.² A disputed removal from Helena to Karnes City is traced in the essay on seat fights.

Building eras

Most counties began with no courthouse at all, meeting in a private house or a log structure put up for the purpose, and a large share have since built three or more.²

The Handbook divides the surviving record into periods. Republic era buildings were modest, borrowed their form from court buildings of the American South and Southeast, and put the courtroom downstairs with offices on the upper floor; no example has lasted.² Before the Civil War counties built bigger, turning more often to brick or stone, and settled on a square block with a hipped roof, a cupola and plain Greek Revival trim. Offices took the ground floor, the courtroom the floor above, and two corridors crossing at the center opened a door toward every side of the square.²

Construction all but stopped during the war. Afterward the old floor plan held while ornament grew richer, and mansard roofs of the Second Empire and the bracketed cornices of the Italianate appeared; Weatherford’s Parker County building of 1885 and Floresville’s Wilson County building of 1884 are the Handbook’s examples.² Late in the century, counties with money to spend commissioned large and picturesque buildings in Romanesque Revival, Renaissance Revival and mixed styles. The Handbook points to J. Riely Gordon’s courthouse at La Grange for Fayette County, the Fort Worth building that Gunn and Curtis designed for Tarrant County, and the Coryell County building at Gatesville.² Dallas County’s red sandstone building of 1892 has a separate entry on Old Red.

After the Chicago exposition of 1893, and under the teaching of the Paris École des Beaux Arts, early twentieth century courthouses moved to Neoclassical and Beaux Arts designs, with columns, pediments and domes outside and often a rotunda within; Waco and San Marcos have leading examples.² The 1930s brought the stripped, linear Moderne, seen in the Travis County building at Austin, and after 1945 architects set aside the older eclectic styles in favor of function and economy.²

Architects and materials

Gordon, the architect most identified with the type, produced at least eighteen Texas courthouses, twelve of which were still standing in 1984.³ He is the subject of a reference entry of his own, and the decade of his commissions is examined in an essay on Gordon’s courthouse years. The Historical Commission ranks W. C. Dodson among the most prolific courthouse designers in the state; his Hood County building of 1890 repeated elements of his work for Lampasas, Parker and Hill counties.⁴

Materials differed from county to county. At Marshall, Gordon combined corn yellow brick and carved limestone from Lueders with pink granite columns.⁵ Corsicana’s courthouse for Navarro County, designed in 1905, joined buff brick to red granite from Burnet.⁶ In Newton County the clay for the 1902 building came from a nearby creek, and the bricks were molded and fired on the square itself.⁷ Where such stone was quarried and how it traveled is the theme of an essay on courthouse quarries, and what the dates cut into these buildings can prove is weighed in the essay on cornerstones.

Preservation

According to the Handbook, a state law now offers limited protection to nineteenth century courthouses; it followed public alarm as older buildings were pulled down and replaced.² The Legislature created the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program, a dedicated state grant program, in 1999, run by the Historical Commission, which reports grants of more than $500 million to 107 courthouses so far, and it added training for county maintenance staff in 2006.¹ The agency’s wider work is summarized in the entry on the Texas Historical Commission.

Plaques of the Travis letter

The Alamo Letter Society’s stated goal is a bronze plaque of the Victory or Death letter of William B. Travis in every one of the 254 courthouses, mounted on the grounds or indoors.⁸ Rosser Newton is a founding member and co chair of the society, which has its own reference entry.⁸ Further subjects appear in the reference index.

References

1. Texas Historical Commission, Courthouse Preservation. ↩ ↩²

2. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, County Courthouses. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

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

4. Texas Historical Commission, Hood County Courthouse. ↩

5. Texas Historical Commission, Harrison County Courthouse. ↩

6. Texas Historical Commission, Navarro County Courthouse. ↩

7. Texas Historical Commission, Newton County Courthouse. ↩

8. Alamo Letter Society, Alamo Letter Society. ↩ ↩²