Set in Stone

When one thinks of Hopkins County, the mind no doubt jumps to the Hopkins County courthouse. Completed in red granite and pink sandstone, the five-story Romanesque revival structure by James Reily Gordon towers over the surrounding landscape. On Aug. 22, the historical landmark will celebrate its 125th anniversary of completion as a proud testament to the enduring spirit of its county folk.

EARLY YEARS

The Hopkins County courthouse is actually the fourth such county courthouse to stand in Hopkins, according to historical documentation. The Tarrant townsite, founded in 1846, was the first county seat due to its rich soils from silt runoff. The early white settlers didn’t have much money to erect permanent buildings, so it took five years to raise enough money to build a courthouse, and they had to sell off cattle to add to the courthouse fund.

The first Tarrant courthouse was a single-story clapboard building. The town later built a brick replacement with two stories and a chimney at each end, which was a “great source of pride,” according to Hopkins County historian Jeff Campbell. The courthouse also had its own well and a picket fence, and housed all court proceedings and county business. However, starting in 1868 the county was placed under military rule, as refusal to free slaves, violence against free blacks and guerrilla opposition to the reconstruction era meant the Union sent an army detachment to the county’s larger city, Sulphur Springs.

For a brief period of time, county business was hosted out of a hotel in downtown Sulphur Springs, although historians cannot determine which of the city’s two hotels housed Union soldiers.

On Sept. 29, 1868, plans for a stockade to house the Union soldiers were commissioned. Constructed of a split log fence, they rented a lot. It is now marked across from Sulphur Springs City Hall’s back parking lot and bounded Atkins, Mulberry, North Davis and Connally streets. This is where Hopkins County held its court functions until July 1, 1870.

Following tensions between Union soldiers and county slave owners in 1868, and a fire set to a hotel at which the soldiers were staying, Union soldiers packed up and left in 1870, to the “absolute fury,” of Tarrant citizens, according to Hopkins County historian June Tuck. Records were then moved from the Tarrant courthouse to Sulphur Springs. In 1871, an official act of the 12th legislative session of the State of Texas appointed Sulphur Springs the county seat of Hopkins County. Not long after, the sheriff ordered the abandoned Tarrant courthouse up for sale, and it was dismantled board by board and brick by brick.

After being without a courthouse during the Union occupation, the citizens of Hopkins County were determined to have a functional legal system and a county government building to call home. A two-story wooden courthouse sat adjacent to the current courthouse building, where the pergola of the Hopkins County Veterans Memorial now provides onlookers with shade.

The first Sulphur Springs courthouse did not stand for long before a fire ravaged the building Feb. 11, 1894. The building was a total loss, with nothing left but the steel vault doors that guarded the county clerk’s office.

“They had a fire lit under them—quite literally,” said former county commissioner Pct. I turned FEMA grant writer Beth Wiesenbaker.

FROM THE ASHES

In April 1894 the commissioners court passed a resolution providing for the construction of a new courthouse for a price tag of $53,000. Calculating for inflation, that cost would now be approximately $1.7 million. The now-famous landmark took shape over the course of the next 16 months, although the cost rose to approximately $75,000, or $2.2 million in today’s dollars.

“You just can’t believe how quickly they did it,” Wiesenbaker said. “It took us 33 months to refurbish it and $5 million. We weren’t even building it from the ground up.”

The funds for the courthouse came from the early use of what we now call bond elections, and many East and Central Texas locations were locked in an arms race to build bigger and more beautiful courthouses, Wiesenbaker said. James Riely Gordon was a popular architect throughout Texas for his courthouse designs and had provided plans for Ellis County in Waxahachie, McLennan County in Waco, San Antonio in Bexar and as close as Canton in Van Zandt County. Yet Hopkins County, with the spirit of exceptionalism that has pervaded the collective mindset, asked Gordon to vary his stock design.

A hallmark of the Romanesque revival architecture is its cross-shape building. Found across the cathedrals of Europe built in the 6th to 11th centuries, the symmetry pays homage to Christ on the cross while providing thoroughfares for which cross-breezes can easily move. To further help with temperature retention, the building materials are often stone, and the walls are of massive thickness. They also feature arcades, which are arches supported on rows of columns. Columns can have Corinthian or Baroque relief. The tower is one of the most important features of Romanesque revival architecture, and ornate facades are also featured prominently.

“These grand courthouses made a statement about a commitment to the law,” said Gordon biographer Chris Meister. “This sense of permanence for an established community that valued the rule of law attracted immigrants to Texas.”

By bringing in the Romanesque style, it gave communities a sense that the courthouses “had been there forever,” Meister noted.

The Hopkins County courthouse showcases all these aspects typical of the Romanesque revival architectural style, but with a few unique additions. Although the typical structure of the building is oriented East-West or North-South, the Hopkins County Courthouse is turned on an angle, and its entrances are from an angle, rather than on the four corners of the building. According to Wiesenbaker, this is because the land donated for its construction was small and located at the corner of the square rather than its center. A typical city square has its courthouse dead center. But again, Hopkins County is rare.

“It does make it confusing for first time visitors which door they should enter,” Hopkins County Judge Robert Newsom joked.

The center of the courthouse also features not one, but two “double helix” staircases that stretch from the basement to the tower. The dizzying focal point, ordered from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue, is now where the county keeps a three-story Christmas tree during the holiday season. No other courthouse in Texas features more than one central staircase, Wiesenbaker said.

The tower is an interesting departure not only from Romanesque architecture, but also from most other municipal structures. For one thing, as a clock tower, it contains no clock. This was by design, according to Newsom.

“They [county commissioners] voted not to have a clock, because if you got up with the sunrise and went to bed when it was dark, then you were doing all right,” Newsom said.

Newsom joked it was “pretty good advice, even to this day.”

However, Hopkins County historian and mayor John Sellers heard a different story.

“The old story was that the people in the rural areas said that the people in the city would just sit and watch the clock all day,” Sellers told the News-Telegram in 2019.

With the plans settled, the over 200-pound blocks were shipped in from elsewhere in Texas. The pink granite came from Burnett, and the red sandstone came from Pecos. Each block was carefully carved into shape where it was mined and inscribed on the back with an identifying number. After making the trip to Hopkins County, it was hoisted into place by a winch system and a Hopkins County hero named Pete the donkey, according to lore. The local builders knew where to assemble the blocks by their numbers, Wiesenbaker said.

“They literally built the courthouse by the number,” she marveled.

By Aug. 22, 1895, the new courthouse was ready to open for official business and accept all visitors.

GRAND DAYS & DISREPAIR

The Hopkins County courthouse was the center of life for local residents throughout the 20th century. Ranchers and cattlemen gathered in the commissioners court to hear county business, and the floors were concrete just as they are now, given that country folk often track in mud on their boots. For the tobacco chewers there was a spittoon placed conveniently in most every room, as documents for furniture orders illuminated that more than 130 spit vessels adorned the courthouse. The courtroom on the second floor hosted a wide variety of jury trials, speaking events and lecture series.

“It was the place you wanted to be to know what was going on in your community,” Wiesenbaker said. “There was no television!”

According to Newsom, the lower-level seating of the second floor courtroom was not segregated. Any man, white black or Hispanic could occupy the bench floor seating for a trial or lecture. It was rather women who were relegated to the balcony step seats.

“It was just like the sale barn seating up there,” Newsom said. “Of course, back in those days the ladies had the large bustles so they had to have room big enough to spread out.”

The courthouse also lacked other markers of segregation, according to those who restored it. There was no signage for segregated drinking fountains, only signage asking patrons not to spit in the apparatus.

A main feature of the criminal justice system was the jail building and Sheriff ’s quarters attached to the courthouse. In fact, a rickety catwalk was still present to the second floor courtroom when Newsom began to serve as a jailer during the early 1980s.

"We used to bring prisoners all the way across from the jail, and that was nearly 40 years ago,” Newsom remembered.

In fact, Newsom said, those looking from the outside can still see the small door they used, suspended in midair, its threshold a slightly different pink granite than the surrounding stone.

The Sheriff lived at the courthouse until 1949, former Hopkins County constable Roger “Tex” Maynard told the News-Telegram. W.E. “Bud” Melton held the prisoners at the Sheriff ’s office while his wife cooked their meals, according to 1942 editions of the News-Telegram. Today, Hopkins County’s incarcerated eat much differently, as they grow and prepare much of their own food at the Trustie farm.

Tex was the last law enforcement officer to take residence at the court, where he stayed over the fall of 1965 as a new recruit to the Department of Public Safety as a highway patrol trooper in order to save his money to move his family up from Howe and give them a good Christmas. He bunked on a cot in the drafty third floor jury room, which now sometimes hosts budget work sessions or fire chiefs meetings.

Although the courthouse was a beloved part of Hopkins County life, wear and tear began to show. As vehicles became the primary mode of transportation, the city removed the watering trough it kept in the square for horses. For some reason, this led the basement of the courthouse to flood every time it rained, Newsom remembered.

As the basement flooding got worse, the county would attempt quick fixes, Newsom said. As the Sheriff was formerly in charge of courthouse maintenance, an easy way to stop the flooding—at least temporarily—was just to add another layer of cement to the existing floor and proceed with county business until the next flood.

“I’d go down there and bump my head just about every time,” Newsom recalled.

The second floor courtroom, once a beloved gallery for gatherings, had its windows boarded up to minimize street noise from oversized trucks as they rumbled by on State Highway 154. Through cracks forming in the window casings, birds got in and left feathers and droppings all over the balcony seating. And for acoustics and to reduce heating costs, paneling was installed to drop the ceiling to make the room half its height. The county began to use the balcony to store excess junk, Wiesenbaker remembered forlornly.

“When I got here in 1997, we were bulging at the seams,” Wisenbaker, who served on the commissioner’s court at that time, said. “All the county and district offices were housed in the courthouse, and it carried all the administrators and judicial offices.”

GROWING PAINS

As it was constructed in 1895, the building had no provisions for modern electrical wiring. Newsom described the cobbled-together electrical work as “just bare wire, hanging in midair.”

Heating and cooling could not reach all parts of the building. The third floor was sweltering hot, and all of those who worked in the bottom floor offices kept space heaters, although they constantly worried about floods short-circuiting their electronics, Newsom said.

“Honestly, it was all a bit dangerous,” Newsom mused.

The building was also non-compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I do remember having to carry wheelchair users all the way up the stairs to court,” Newsom said. “Their wheelchair had to be folded up and carried up separately. At least I didn’t drop anyone.”

One day, Wiesenbaker and the other county employees had enough. They approached former County Judge Joe Minter and told him the courthouse needed fixing up.

“At the time, everything was painted this awful, awful pink color. The county must have bought it by the truckload,” Wiesenbaker said. “Judge Minter said, ‘Well, we can see if we have some more of that pink paint around.’”

But Wiesenbaker and the other county employees emphatically told him no. Along with treasurer Betty Moore Bassham, county auditor Suzanne Bauer and maintenance supervisor Tony Goodson, they promised Minter they wouldn’t make a mess, picked up paint scrapers and took to a corner. Under layers of pink, green and beige paint they uncovered a treasure: curly heart pine, as rare as it is beautiful.

The discovery spurred inspiration in the court to rehabilitate the historic building, especially given the electrical fire that took the Hill County courthouse in 1993. Early articles on the process from the News-Telegram showed that planning meetings in the summer of the year 2000 were drawing crowds of citizens upwards of 50, and the commissioners thought they could raise approximately $600,000 by themselves. However, the committee, chaired by judges Minter and Cletis Millsap, were hopeful they could be part of the inaugural class of a state grant program, which could provide them with up to $3.2 million from the state and allow them to raise $1.7 million in bonds for a total of $5 million for the project.

Minter, Millsap, H.W. Calvin Prince, Mary Bonham and countless others toiled away at the grant process. However, they would not concede a measure that would have gained them two points on the grant criteria, according to Wiesenbaker. The state would have ranked Hopkins County’s application more highly if it had ceded control of the building to the state historical society to maintain the space as a museum. But Minter and Millsap had no intentions of doing so, Wiesenbaker noted.

“It is to stay a living, breathing courthouse,” she said. “We weren’t going to give that up. And Judge Minter, when they asked him, he said… ‘I’m going to take that letter and fold it into an itty bitty paper airplane and fly it out my window.’”

The state continues to ask for the rights to the building, and each subsequent court has denied the request, Newsom stated.

“I love it here. I don’t want to move,” Newsom said. “ It’s the history of it that is breathtaking.”

In the end, it seemed the court need not have worried their tough stance on keeping the courthouse in Hopkins County hands would prevent them from getting the grant funding.

“One day we were in court, and George W. Bush just walked in,” Newsom remembered. “He shook everyone’s hand, and I mean everyone. I got down off the bench, all the jurors, everything. He was governor at the time and wanted to see this project get off the ground. That’s when it seemed like things really got going for us.”

GLORY RESTORED

By June 2001, courthouse construction was underway, according to the Hopkins County Echo.

Over the next 33 months, the courthouse underwent major changes. Crews chiseled away layer after layer of concrete in the basement, and installed a complex French drain system as well as six sump pumps. Now the basement no longer floods, and there are offices there.

All the wood in the building has been restored to its original glory. There were only minimal places where the original wood was missing, but the historical restoration crew was able to raise curly pine timbers sunken in riverbeds across East Texas during log drives of the 1800s.

The second floor courtroom is once again a brilliant gathering place, which has hosted the symphony orchestra, children's choirs and political forums just as it used to. All electric work is safe and tucked away, and the court surrendered 5,000 square feet of space for an ADA compliant elevator.

The furniture that now sits in the offices of the judge, county commissioners and meeting rooms was specialty-ordered from the Chicago company that originally made the furniture in 1895, with a great grandson now at the helm. The one exception is the second floor courtroom, which has Amish-made curved benches, as the religious group were the only ones with the tools to make the benches curve.

“To me, this is the history of Hopkins County,” Wiesenbaker said. “It’s not that we don’t want nice things, but we want durability.”

The Hopkins County Courthouse draws visitors from Texas and around the world who take time to marvel at the architecture inside and out. If Newsom has a free moment, he tries to take them on a tour.

“Court after court has owned and maintained it like they would their home,” Newsom said. “I give thanks to God every day I get to work here.”