Ellis County Courthouse

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Ellis County, Texas, and a courthouse story that starts with cedar logs and ends with something that changed the whole state of Texas. Pull up a chair.

This one earns it. The first courthouse Ellis County ever had was built right here, on this very ground, in 1850. Cedar logs.

That's it. That's what justice looked like. A second courthouse went up on this same square in 1853, a third in 1874, and by 1894 the county decided it was time to stop building courthouses that history could forget.

So they commissioned a man named James Riely Gordon, Virginia-born, working out of San Antonio, to design the fourth Ellis County courthouse to stand on this site. Now, Gordon had built courthouses before. He knew the style he loved: Richardsonian Romanesque, a grand architectural language created by a Bostonian named Henry Hobson Richardson back in the 1870s.

Gordon had popularized it all across Texas. But here, here in Ellis County, he did something different. He deviated from every courthouse he'd designed before.

He opened up the exterior with two-story arcaded and colonnaded porticos, and he tucked the entrances into inside angles. Nobody had seen quite that from him before. The cornerstone was laid on July 4th, 1895, and if you're gonna set a cornerstone, that is the day to do it, and the building was completed in 1897.

Four main entrances, each one purposely oriented toward a true compass point: North, South, East, and West. Not approximately. Not close enough.

True. The faces that look down from the courthouse walls were sculpted by European stonemasons, carved in stone that came from two very different corners of Texas, red and gray granite out of Central Texas, and red sandstone pulled from way out west, from the Pecos River country. Stone that had to travel to get here, same as the ideas that shaped the building.

When it was done, Gordon's Ellis County courthouse had set a new standard for public buildings across the entire state of Texas. Four courthouses on this ground. The first one cedar logs.

The last one, stone faces and granite and a silhouette that rewrote the rules. Ellis County didn't just get a courthouse, it got the one that changed what came after.

What the marker says

Ellis County's first courthouse was made of cedar logs and built here in 1850. A second courthouse was built on this square in 1853 and a third in 1874. In 1894 Virginia native and San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon was commissioned to design the fourth Ellis County courthouse to be built at this site. The cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1895, and the courthouse completed in 1897 with each of its main entrances purposely oriented toward true North, South, East and West compass points. Faces which adorn the courthouse were sculpted by European stonemasons. The "Richardsonian Romanesque" architectural style used by Gordon to design this building was created by Bostonian Henry Hobson Richardson in the 1870s and popularized in Texas by Gordon. For this structure Gordon deviated from previous Texas courthouses he had designed in the "Richardsonian Romanesque" style by displaying open, two-story arcaded and colonnaded porticos on the exterior of the building and placing entrances at inside angles. Red and gray granite from Central Texas and red sandstone from the Pecos River in West Texas were used to build this courthouse. Gordon's Ellis County courthouse design set a new standard for other public buildings erected in Texas.