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Restoring Two Old Reds
by Bob Bowman | |
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Red
River County Courthouse Tower, Clarksville
TE photo, 2000 |
A couple of grand
old ladies, both with identical nicknames, are getting facelifts on different
ends of East Texas.
In Red River County, one of East
Texas' oldest and northernmost counties, the courthouse
at Clarksville
is undergoing a renovation deserving of its history. And as a part of the renovation,
the courthouse clock, nicknamed Old Red, is scheduled to be rebuilt.
Built in 1885, the courthouse
boasts turrets and buttresses of mellow yellow stone cut from a quarry near Honey
Grove. Because its architecture is part Victorian, part Gothic, and part Italian
Renaissance, someone once described it as Late 19th Century Debatable. The courthouse
clock ticked from 2:30 p.m. on May 27, 1885, until it developed troubles and was
electrified in 1961. This saved the janitor of 30 minutes of hard winding once
a week, but four months later, at 4:35 a.m. on a June morning, Old Red started
striking and struck her bells 120 time before someone pulled the plug.
A town wag described it as the night that got later than it ever has been. |
Some
150 miles south of Clarksville,
in the small town of Trinity on a peninsula of Lake Livingston, another
Old Red is getting a new life.
Trinity's Old Red is a schoolhouse
built in 1911-13. During its life, the red-brick building served thousands of
Trinity County children.
The building had been abandoned as a school
and was becoming a community eyesore until its former students stepped in and
raised some $100,000 to restore it with a new exterior, new woodwork, and other
improvements.
With the exterior completed, the Save Old Red Committee
will turn the building back to its owner, the Trinity Independent School District,
for interior remodeling.
Old Red's rescue might not have happened if
Raymond Smith, who attended school inside Old Red in the 1940s. He got
involved in 1993 with other ex-students when they learned of the building's possible
demise.
Old Red served as Trinity's only school building until 1928
when a second two-story structure was built next door to house the town's junior
high and high school.
Although Old Red's bricks were later painted yellow,
their original red color gave the school its nickname. The building was built
in the shape of a T to capture wind from any direction it could blow in Trinity.
The building had 91 wooden windows, which were copied by the remodeling crews,
many of which were made up of Old Red's former students.
"When I found
out Old Red had been condemned and was going to be torn down, it really tugged
at my heart," said Smith. | |
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