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Two Courthouse
Fires
by Bob Bowman
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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.)
See Texas
Courthouses |
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