THROCKMORTON, Texas (AP) - The courthouse is in the home stretch now. Nobody is happier about it than Trey Carrington.
“I’m just glad we’re going to get through with it, we started working on this thing when the program was first started,” he said.
Carrington, the Throckmorton County judge, said that for more than a year the 125-year-old building has undergone an extensive restoration. About $2.4 million was provided by the Texas Historic Courthouse Restoration Program, with approximately an additional $2.8 million provided locally. Originally November 2014 was the target for completion.
“We’re actually going to have substantial completion - when I give the building back to the owner - on Feb. 24,” project superintendent Kenath Hawkins told the Abilene Reporter-News (https://bit.ly/17gN8NG). “Then on March 12 is the grand opening.”
The biggest change to the courthouse is the now-missing annex which used to occupy the west side of the structure.
“We lost pretty close to half of our office space losing that annex,” Carrington said. “The courthouse was built in 1890 and that annex was built in 1939.”
Offices for the sheriff and county clerk are now across the street on the north side in what’s known locally as the Old Bank Building. It’s on a street so small it doesn’t even have a name.
The aftermath of the annex’s construction 76 years later was not pretty. The courthouse’s limestone on that side was a wreck.
“I mean it looked like World War III,” Hawkins said. “They’d poked holes all through it. They had put all their floor and ceiling joists in it.”
The stone blocks had been torn up to accommodate attaching the annex walls. What remained were not only deep holes, but grooves and misshapen blocks.
But in this kind of work there are no problems, only solutions. The stone came out and Hawkins crew set to work.
“Our guys retooled them and put them back up,” he said. “I think that everybody who knows what we started with was super-impressed with how the limestone came back, because it’s beautiful now.”
They also repurposed some of the blocks from the annex itself, shaping them to fit into the courthouse’s exterior, both functionally and to match the others in style. Some rock did have to be quarried for corners and parts of the doorway, but not much.
“That’s why I’m saying that 90 percent of the courthouse is the original limestone,” Hawkins said.
But the story of the Throckmorton County Courthouse is also a tale of two sisters. It’s accepted local lore that the old Rayner Courthouse is, if not an identical twin, then certainly a close sibling to Throckmorton’s building.
Where is Rayner? Well, it’s not really anywhere, anymore. Just another of the countless little Texas communities that sprang up, lived, and then faded away after its citizens left it.
But in this case the courthouse they’d established is still standing, or at least leaning. Rayner was the Stonewall County seat until 1898 when, according to the Texas State Historical Association, an election moved it to Aspermont because many felt that town was more centrally located.
Still, it wasn’t until 1900 that a new courthouse was built and the old one was abandoned, along with the community around it. The building was eventually sold to a private owner and converted into a residence.
It’s located off U.S. 380 between Old Glory and Aspermont, nearly across the road from Judge Ward’s liquor store, Mo’s Place. If you stop by, say howdy to his parrot, Phoenix.
But you probably won’t be able to see the old courthouse unless you stand at the gate. Reports are that sections of the porch are falling in and a hive of bees and maybe some friendly snakes are the only ones that live there now.
“The architects went over there and were able to get into the building and look, but the (owner) told them don’t take nothing, don’t scratch nothing and that’s all you can do,” Carrington said of the reconnaissance mission. “They looked at some of the things that might have been covered up over the last 100 years.”
Neither building had the cupola that used to top the Throckmorton courthouse, and presumably the Rayner one as well.
“I guess in 1921 the cupola got struck by lightning or a storm affected it, so they took it down,” Hawkins said. “We went to a company in Kentucky and they rebuilt it. We gave them the design from the old pictures, and they did their best to put it back together.”
With one major difference, instead of wood the cupola now is made out of metal. If that sounds counter intuitive, especially if it was lightning that destroyed the original, Hawkins’ KBL Restorations crew had a simple fix for that problem, too.
“The weather vane at the top is a lightning rod,” he said. A cable will conduct any strikes down to a grounding rod outside the building.
The vault door has been restored, as well. It took six men to manhandle the 900-pound door back into place. But don’t think to store anything there, if it could open all you would see is the new elevator shaft. The door is decorative and meant to mark where the vault used to be, it’s now across the street with the sheriff and clerk.
Why an elevator? Because as a public building it must be compliant with federal accessibility laws. Removing the vault allowed a place for the elevator’s machinery.
But if modern concerns trump authenticity, so be it. All’s well that ends well for Carrington - he’s looking forward to March 12.
“Just like most projects, it hasn’t come in right at the exact time they thought, but we’re OK with it,” he said.
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Information from: Abilene Reporter-News, https://www.reporternews.com
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