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Texas
| Architecture
| Courthouses
Dignity, Decorum
and Justice
Mark Texas' Courthouse Histories,
Except for the Fights, Arsons, Thefts, etc
by Bill Morgan
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Animal Rites
All right, who ate the pig's ears?
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Page 1
Texas
grew up riding horses and herding cattle, so it's not surprising that
farm and ranch critters played a big role in the building of the ornate
courthouses of the late 1800s. One that wasn't so ornate was located
in the old Angelina
County seat of Homer,
eight miles east of present-day seat Lufkin.
On hot days, court was held under a tree on Isaac Dunagan's place.
Everybody sat on split-log benches. One steamy summer day a man was
on trial for stealing a neighbor's pig and butchering it. The
trial turned on the porker's ears, the only physical evidence available.
Tempers ran as hot as the thermometer and a fight broke out. After
officers separated the combatants and restored order, the judge was
forced to drop the case: during the confusion a dog sneaked up to
the bench and ate the evidence.
The original Cooke
County log courthouse was built in 1850 and cost $30, which averaged
out to ten bucks a year. It would have lasted longer if Jim Dickson's
bull had stayed home. A rancher who lived down the street from
the courthouse, Dickson kept his breed bull in a pen behind the house
to protect it from rustlers. One day heel flies so tormented the bull
that he brokethrough his fence, galloped down the street and through
the open front door of the 16-by-16-foot courthouse. With his full
head of steam, the bull rammed the far wall and brought the building
down around him. Minutes of an emergency commissioners court meeting
on January 15, 1853 stipulate that a new courthouse "shall be built
so strong that Jim Dickson's bull or no other damn bull can butt it
down." And so far no other damn bull has.
Horses have generally been more courthouse-friendly - they've
even helped build a few. Most of the counties the Legislature created
west of the present Interstate 35 weren't yet organized in the late
1880s. Once a county's boundaries were defined by the Legislature,
Texas law required one more step before it could set up shop - an
organizational petition with 135 signatures. Several Plains
and Panhandle counties
couldn't scrape up 135 individuals unless they counted horses, cows
and dogs. So civic leaders counted horses, cows and dogs, including
those under the legal voting age.
Haskell County
organized in 1859 by signing horses and dogs on its ranches. Lubbock
County allegedly made the number in 1891 when Rollie Burns added
the names of the horses on the IOA Ranch. That same year Castro
County's petition went over the top with the addition of Billy,
Jug and Blue Carter, three hard-working cow ponies on James Carter's
7-Up Ranch.
Not all the political skullduggery in West
Texas relied on livestock, though. Quanah
didn't vote horses in its 1890 campaign against Margaret
for seat of Hardeman
County, possibly since both towns had about the same number of
livestock. The Fort Worth & Denver Railroad ran through Quanah,
so the town bestowed legal residency on any man who had his laundry
done there for six weeks. Train crews dropped off their laundry
in Quanah and picked up the well-scrubbed results on the return trip.
After six weeks of getting their laundry done, the trainmen voted
in the county-seat contest. Predictably, Quanah
cleaned up on election day.
In a clear case of pork-barrel politics, Anahuac
dislodged Wallisville
as Chambers County
seat after the latter held the title for 50 years, thanks to swine.
A Wallisville city ordinance outlawed pigs from roaming the streets.
Anahuac had no such restrictions and it's been argued ever since that
1907 election that farmers bringing their pork on the hoof to market
didn't cotton to the restrictions. If you've ever seen the stunning
1900
Harrison County courthouse in Marshall,
say a thank-you to pigeons. On June 8, 1899 a maintenance man
climbed to the roof of the existing courthouse. It was his third attempt
to scare pigeons away from the ornate showplace by setting fire to
their hangout. Good news and bad news - he scared off the pigeons,
but he burned down the courthouse. |
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The 1900 Harrison
County courthouse is now the Harrison County Historical Museum.
1939 Photo courtesy TXDoT |
Some purists
might say Hopkins
County got into the courthouse business by rustling cattle.
But the judge saw it differently - the Hopkins County judge. Hopkins
got along without a courthouse for the first six years after it organized
in 1846. Then someone discovered that only cattle owned by Texas residents
were allowed to graze on Texas open land. So Judge William S. Todd
confiscated 300 head belonging to a Louisiana man and turned them
over to the county. The county in turn sold the herd for a dollar
a head and used the $300 to start building its first courthouse.
Page 3
One Man, One Vote (Maybe Two)
Anybody Got a Match?
What's in a Name?
The Artists in Brick, Stone and Mortar
Why
all the fuss over getting the county-seat designation? It was a magnet
for growth. A town boasting a railroad and a courthouse was the equivalent
of today's cities with a large airport hub and a convention center-sports
complex. There's a good chance that any county seat you visit today
has the courthouse because of a bitter, divisive election or even
despite a bitter, divisive election. Page
3 › |
©
Bill Morgan
June
9, 2005
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