Motley County Jail

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Motley County, Texas: and before you even get comfortable, understand that this county was brand new. We're talkin' 1891, the year Motley County was organized, and folks out here had things to do and no time to waste.

First order of business for any self-respecting frontier county? You build something that'll hold. County Judge H.

H. Campbell and his commissioners, Dan Browning, A. B.

Cooper, J. J. John, and W.

E. Power, they got together and awarded a construction contract to a pair of local builders named J. F.

Aiken and J. T. Cornett.

Now, the design they settled on was straightforward and sensible in the way that frontier logic tends to be. Two stories. Cells up top, where you weren't getting out easy.

The jailer's living quarters down on the lower level; close enough to hear everything, far enough to sleep with some dignity. That same year, 1891, they also put up the first courthouse. Two structures rising out of the raw Texas plain at the same moment, a county pulling itself into existence by sheer will and timber and contract.

Here's the thing about the courthouse, though. It burned. Gone.

Just like that; all that early effort, reduced to nothing. But the jail? The jail is still standing.

Still there in Motley County, a two-story testament to the people who built it in the same year they built the county itself. Sometimes the thing meant to hold others ends up being the one thing that holds on.

What the marker says

This 2-story jail was erected in 1891, the year Motley County was organized, after County Judge H. H. Campbell and commissioners Dan Browning, A. B. Cooper, J. J. John and W. E. Power awarded a construction contract to local builders J. F. Aiken and J. T. Cornett. Cells were on the top floor of the structure and jailer's living quarters on the lower level. The first courthouse, also built in 1891, later burned, but this jail remains as a symbol of Motley County's frontier heritage. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-1976