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Two Courthouse Fires
by Bob Bowman | |
Some
of the most delectable historical desserts of East
Texas are found in the yellowed documents of the thirty-plus county
courthouses scattered across the pineywoods.
One such morsel is the
little-known story of two courthouse fires in Trinity County, one of the rowdiest
of our early counties. From Anna Hester of Groveton
comes a pair of old affidavits by J.P. Stevenson, a frontier lawyer, and J.B.
Gipson, the son of a county surveyor. Both lived in the turbulent 1870s.
Their affidavits were transcribed in 1909, apparently in an effort to clarify
property deed records which may have been in dispute.
Stevenson
and Gipson recalled a November, 1, 1872, fire which destroyed most of the county
records at the first county seat at Sumpter. The only surviving documents
were some criminal records of a peace justice and the surveyor’s records of properties
in the county.
At the time, Gipson’s father, George, was the county surveyor
and was holding the survey records at his home in Trinity, about twenty miles
west of Sumpter.
Stevenson had a good reason to remember the fire. As
a lawyer in Trinity and Walker counties since l868, his life revolved around the
courthouse
and the records lost in the fire.
Why and how the courthouse burned is
not clear, but Sumpter was a hotbed of violence during the l860s and early l870s
when federal reconstruction gripped the South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Out of this violent era came a Sumpter preacher’s son, John
Wesley Hardin, who killed three Union soldiers near Sumpter in 1868, and went
on to become Texas’ most notorious gunfighter.
When the Sumpter courthouse
burned, the county seat was located at Trinity in 1873. It remained there
only until 1874 when it was relocated at Pennington, where, according to
Stevenson, another courthouse was burned in 1876, again destroying some county
records.
The county’s land records and criminal documents, however, were
saved. J.T. Evans, the clerk of the local district court, kept the criminal records
in an iron safe, which survived the fire.
Evans also carried the property
deed records to his home the night of the fire after “a number of bad parties
had been indicted” and he became “fearful they would undertake to destroy their
indictments” by burning the courthouse.
Gipson said his surveyor father
saved the land surveys at Pennington by entrusting them to deputy W.M. Freeman
who kept them “in a safe place not in the courthouse.”
“By reason of
this fact, they were again saved from fire at the burning of the courthouse at
Pennington,” wrote J.B. Gipson in his affidavit.
Although the Trinity
County survey records were saved from two fires, the records of the district clerk
were stolen on the night of March 5, 1880, and Gipson said other documents were
later partially destroyed “by rough, bad handling by parties who had access to
them.”
Trinity County moved its courthouse from Pennington to Groveton
in 1882, not only because it was a cental location, but Trinity County Lumber
Company donated the site for a town square and materials for a new courthouse.
It remains there today.
All
Things Historical September
5, 2005 Column
Published with permission
(Distributed by the East Texas
Historical Association. Bob Bowman, of Lufkin, is the author of more than 30 books
about East Texas.)
More Texas
Courthouses
See Groveton,
Texas | Trinity
County Courthouse | |
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