Sunday, November 5, 2000

Planning key to restoring old courthouses

By Bill Whitaker

If officials in Stephens, Eastland and Throckmorton counties were frustrated by their failure to qualify for Texas Historical Commission grant money to repair aging courthouses, commission vice chairwoman Shirley Caldwell understands their pain.

Caldwell is from Al-bany, where pride in the picturesque, 117-year-old Shackelford County Courthouse has always been strong.

That’s one reason it qualified for a Texas Historical Commission grant toward repair work this year.

Now the commission veep is trying to rouse folks in neighboring counties — or anywhere else in Texas — to apply themselves more ag-gressively toward restoration of long-neglected, sagging courthouses to heighten both their self-image and economic pro-spects.

“This goes beyond just fixing up an old building for the sake of fixing up an old building,” she told me after Eastland, Throckmorton and Stephens counties lost out to more than two dozen other courthouses in the commission’s second round of grant allocations.

“Many of these courthouses anchor the small towns where they’re located,” she said, “and the shape they’re in often indicates how people in those towns feel about themselves.”

That’s eloquent talk, but it masks the hard realities facing those who wanted such grants. Competition was fierce and the commission graded area courthouses — and their communities — on such things as local support and completeness.

Dan Utley, the commission’s courthouse program administrator in Austin, tells me county officials didn’t even get to first base unless they forged master plans — to the tune of $20,000 or $30,000 — regarding what they’d do if they got funding.

Some folks were surprised the 1928 Eastland County Courthouse didn’t make the cut, especially considering it houses a genuine tourist attraction — the shriveled corpse of “Old Rip,” the famous horned lizard that allegedly slumbered in an earlier courthouse cornerstone for 31 long years.

But a commission insider confided “a dead horny toad and 10 cents won’t even buy you a cup of coffee.”

Failure of area courthouses to qualify hinged on such shortcomings as a lack of satisfactory plans for protecting invaluable court records during repairs and into the future, failing to submit plans truly addressing building problems, and a lack of proper historical designations.

With any luck, the picture will look rosier if more money is allocated for courthouse restoration efforts by the next Legislature.

Incidentally, it was the grandfather of Shirley Cald-well’s husband, Clifton, who fought against construction of the 1926 Stephens County Courthouse. Famed oilman C.M. Caldwell insisted the courthouse built in 1883 sufficed nicely, thank you.

Now, his grandson fervently hopes Stephens County can restore the very courthouse his granddad opposed: “We’re just trying to keep them from building something worse!”

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com.