The Courthouse in the Center of the Square

The county courthouse is a stone block with a dome, set on the grass square at the center of a Texas town. Its four walls are alike, each one fronted by a covered porch and a pair of wooden doors. The stone is old and gray, pitted in a thousand small places where the rain has worked at the surface over the years.

Of the four sets of steps, the west steps are the worn ones. Their centers have been rubbed smooth and hollowed out until each tread has a shallow dish in its middle, a hollow a hand might fit into. The east steps are only slightly worn. The north and south steps are almost untouched, and they serve as benches for the people who wait in the shade under the porch.

The doors are taller than they are wide, panelled in dark wood and hung on heavy iron hinges. Above each door is a fanlight, and the fanlight throws a fan-shaped patch of light onto the floor of the hallway inside. The porch columns are square, cut from the same stone as the walls, and they are fluted on the inner faces only, so that the decoration is visible to a person leaving or entering, not to a person passing by.

The dome rises at the center of the building, where the two hallways cross. It is low and eight-sided, and its surface is copper that has gone dark green. The green is not uniform; water has streaked it in darker runs from the top to the eaves. On four sides of the dome, the clock faces are set into the slope. They are circles of white, with plain black hands and painted numerals. The four hands do not quite agree; one face is a few minutes ahead of another, and a person walking around the building sees the time jump backwards and forwards in small steps.

Inside, the corridor runs straight from the east door to the west door, and a cross-hall runs from the north door to the south door. The floor is dark terrazzo, packed with chips of white and gray stone. The walls are painted green up to the height of a tall man's shoulders, and cream above that. The same paint covers the baseboards and the edges of the door frames, which are worn down to the bare wood in the places where hands have rested.

The courtroom is on the second floor, directly under the dome. It is a long room with a stamped metal ceiling, painted white, with a pattern of leaves that is visible only when the light strikes it from an angle. The judge's bench is against the west wall, and the jury box is built into the south wall. The floor is wood, and it makes a noise like a rifle shot when a chair scrapes, because the room is so high that sound does not settle.

Around the outside, the lawn comes right up to the foundation. The first course of stone is at ground level, so that the building appears to rise directly out of the grass. The gutters empty at the four corners, and over many rainstorms the water has cut a small groove in the lawn at each corner, a channel that begins at a downspout and runs a few feet into the grass before it disappears.

Four streets enter the square at its corners, not at its sides. As a result, the courthouse is seen from each street at an angle, one corner of the building pointed toward the approaching road. The building is oriented so that its four faces face not the streets but the diagonal views between the streets. A person walking down any street sees the corner first, then the gradual opening of a facade, and finally the paired doors. The building turns itself in front of the walker, a quiet, slow rotation of stone.

It sits in the middle of the square, exactly at the center of the block of grass, with its four corners aligned to the four gaps between the streets.

Photos: Rich Anderson (CC BY-SA 2.0)