1890 Cornerstone Ceremony

The cornerstone the Masons laid in 1890 went into a building that weather has remade more than once. Eugene T. Heiner designed it with steep roofs and a tall clock tower. It came through the 1900 storm unharmed, but the 1909 hurricane tore off the tower and most of the roof, and the county chose a cheaper copper dome with a glass skylight. A 1981 storm damaged the tile roof, and in 2006 part of the courtroom's plaster ceiling fell with no trial in session. A state-funded restoration, rededicated May 17, 2014, returned most details to their 1910 look.

What the plaque says

1890 Cornerstone Ceremony The building of the Colorado County Courthouse began with a public celebration July 7, 1890. About 3,000 people attended a barbecue in a grove north of town. They later marched to the Courthouse Square in a procession led by a local marching band. Members of Caledonia Lodge No. 68, A. F. & A. M. laid the cornerstone with Masonic ceremonies. Following the ceremony the crowd gathered together for a return procession to the grove. Later that evening a grand ball was held at the Stafford Opera House. The new Courthouse was completed in February 1891. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — steps away
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 18 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 20 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• Columbus Oak — steps away
• William Menefee — steps away
• Tumlinson Family — steps away
• The Rangers of Austin's Colony — steps away