National Register Listing

Cooke County Courthouse

Public Square, bounded by California, Dixon, Main and Commerce Sts., Gainesville, TX

When it was built in 1911 the Cooke County Courthouse, designed by the prominent Dallas architectural firm of Lang & Witchell, was an architecturally progressive design for a small-town Texas courthouse. It is nominated at the local level of significance under Criterion c in the area of architecture, demonstrating Beaux-Arts design, Sullivanesque detail, and an emerging modernistic aesthetic in classical design. It is also significant in the area of Politics/Government for its association over the past 80 years with the events of Cooke County government.

Cooke County was organized in 1848 and its economy was built primarily on cattle ranching after the Civil War. Cattle driving could be a profitable endeavor and Gainesville, as the Cooke county seat, shows the prosperity of the 1870s and 1880s in its surviving commercial buildings of that period. In 1879 the Denison and Pacific Railway was built through town, and in 1886 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe came through. The railway crossing in Gainesville both assured the town's continued prosperity and facilitated the evolution of its economy. As in much of Texas, cotton increasingly became the cash crop of the county, offering a very profitable industry around the turn of the century. Cooke County farmers continued to raise livestock, corn and wheat, maintaining a diversified agricultural base.

The Cooke County Courthouse is among a relatively small group of Texas courthouses built in the early 20th century. The 1880s and 1890s were the most active years of courthouse building in the state; indeed, Cooke County's previous courthouse was built in 1880. However, when it burned in 1909, the effort began to rebuild in a style and scale appropriate to the aspirations of the county. By 1910, when the courthouse was being built, the price of cotton had declined and a lack of rain in preceding years had hurt the wheat and corn crops, causing a local recession. This was the climate in which the voters of the county approved a bond issue of $125,000 to finance the construction of the courthouse. Coverage in the Gainesville Register at the time that the courthouse was completed suggested that the construction of such a grand facility was not approved without controversy in the conservative and struggling farming community.

The architectural standard for public buildings of the day was Beaux Arts or Classical Revival design. of the approximately 40 surviving Texas courthouses built between 1908 and 1914, all but a very few are based on classical motifs. The most common form is that of the rectangular or square block with slightly projecting pedimented porticoes or entry wings incorporating a classical order. A tower traditionally crowned the courthouse and varied greatly in design from county to county. Characteristics of the Beaux Arts designs, as distinguished from the simpler classical Revival, are the heavier use of ornamentation, the rustication of the lower levels or "plinth" of the building, a varying of wall depths, and a strongly formal plan.

The county commissioners' selection of the prominent Dallas firm of Lang & Witchell as architects for the Cooke County Courthouse reflects both great optimism about the community's future and a surprisingly progressive bent. Otto Lang and Frank Witchell were known for their work in Dallas, a young city in the midst of rapid growth as a regional trade center. Their designs increasingly reflected the influences of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Prairie School of architecture within a framework of Beaux Arts formality. When commissioned by Cooke County, Lang & Witchell had recently designed the Harris County Courthouse in Houston. Soon thereafter they were hired to design the Johnson County Courthouse in Cleburne. These three buildings illustrate wonderfully the evolution of Lang & Witchell's design while following a nearly identical formula in plan and massing for each.

The Harris County Courthouse is the most traditional Beaux Arts design of the three. It is finished in granite and brick and, at six stories, is larger than the later two designs, but shows very similar proportions. It uses rusticated walls and segmental-arch portals in the piano nobile, built of rough-faced granite in a fairly established treatment. The composite columns are traditionally detailed and the portico projections are pedimented. The tower is round in plan, squattier than in the later designs, and has a dome supported by classical columns. The Cooke County design also respects the established Beaux-Arts formula, but it is bolder in the geometrical details: the ashlar rustication creates stark horizontal lines in the base of the building, the terra cotta details are executed in an angular style, and the tower is squared with classical columns as a less prominent element. The original 4th-floor windows with their decorative upper sash suggested the Prairie School influence, and inside the Sullivanesque details are a dramatic departure from traditional detailing. In the Johnson County Courthouse, the Prairie School details are moved to the exterior, the classical motifs are toned down, and the building takes on a distinctively modern angularity. The rusticated plinth with segmental portals, the engaged columns on the main elevations, plus the basic form of the building remain. But flanking the projecting entry wings are blocky corner pylons that rise slightly above the parapet and have Wrightian abstracted swags at the top. They echo the design of the tower that is of exaggerated height and has abstract, geometrical detailing. The small dome on the tower is a far cry from the traditional capital dome supported by classical columns of the Harris County Courthouse.

The Lang & Witchell plans for the Cooke County Courthouse were accepted by the commissioners' court on April 10, 1910. The architectural firm of Garrett and Collins of Gainesville was contracted as supervising architects of the project. M.P. Kelly of Gainesville was selected to build the courthouse. The supervising architects and contractors were known primarily for their work around Gainesville on public buildings and public works projects. The cornerstone of the courthouse was ceremoniously laid on November 10, 1910, and the courthouse was finished late in 1911 at a final cost of approximately $150,000.

The Cooke County Courthouse was received by the community with great pride in its thoroughly modern and elegant facility. It filled all of the anticipated official and nonofficial functions of the time. The role of the county courthouse in the life of an agricultural community is made apparent by the attention paid to the provision of a "ladies rest room" in the Cooke County Courthouse.

contemporaneous newspaper account goes into some discussion of the lounge designed "so that visiting ladies would have a known convenient place for rest after traveling to the city..." The courthouse square, and the courthouse as its focus, were the destination of farming families when they came to Gainesville to sell their cotton or buy their provisions. Beyond its official legal functions, the courthouse was a place to meet, trade and rest before returning home. Although oil replaced cotton as the economic base in the 1920s, Cooke County remains an area of diversified agriculture. Over the course of the 20th century, the 1911 courthouse in Gainesville has been at the center of the public life of the county and is interwoven with the events of the government and its people.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1991.