Harrison County Courthouse

Duane's take

The official marker tells this one, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Now, let me set the scene for you. Harrison County, Texas.

A courthouse square with a story that goes back further than most folks stop to think about. See, the building standing there today isn't the first. It isn't even the second.

It's the third courthouse to occupy that very same patch of ground, and if those stones could talk, they'd have some tales to tell. The first one went up in 1851, a modest place they called Little Virginia. Then came a brick Gothic structure in 1889, and that one, well, it burned in 1899.

Gone in a year that rhymed with its own birth. So Harrison County found itself starting over, with nothing but ash and ambition and a site that had seen it all before. What they built next was something to behold.

Construction finished in 1900. The price tag came to sixty-two thousand dollars. And what did that buy?

Granite, brick, and marble. A Capitol-styled building in classic Roman architecture, with a dome clock and a belfry, and surmounting it all, a symbolic figure of justice, looking out over Harrison County like she's been watching the whole time and intends to keep right on doing it. Then the story takes one more turn.

When a new courthouse opened on Whetstone Square, this grand old building didn't sit idle. In 1964, it became the site of the Harrison County Museum, given its own space within those storied walls. Three courthouses on one site.

One built, one burned, one turned into a keeper of memory. That's Harrison County for you. History doesn't leave, it just finds a new purpose.

What the marker says

Built 1900. Cost $62,000. Third on this site. (Little Virginia, 1851; brick Gothic, 1889, burned in 1899.) This one of granite, brick and marble. Capitol-styled, classic Roman architecture, with a dome clock and belfry surmounted by a symbolic figure of justice. In 1964 became site of Harrison County Museum, in space allotment after new Courthouse was opened on Whetstone Square. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965