Courthouses of Brown County

The 1917 courthouse is really a rebuild. In 1916 county leaders decided voters would not approve a bond issue and chose to remodel the 1884 building instead; the work was so thorough that only the vault and a few walls survived. The wooden courthouse before it burned on March 29, 1880, after jail prisoners tried to burn through the floor to escape. A deputy, Jim Bevans, dragged them out. The county then had no courthouse until 1885, only a vacant square.

What the plaque says

Courthouses of Brown County Brown County, created in 1856 and organized two years later, has had four courthouses. Pioneer settler Welcome William Chandler donated land for the first courthouse, a log cabin. The county moved the building twice, first two miles to the Billy Connell Farm, then to this site after Greenleaf Fisk's donation of land for a new townsite resolved an 1868 dispute. Commissioners also added a second story to the structure. A combination courthouse and jail built in 1876 served only four years before it burned. Waco architectural firm Dodson & Dudley designed a new building in 1884. The current Classical Revival courthouse, built in 1917-18, incorporated interior walls and vaults from the prior structure. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Brownwood State Park — 9.7 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.

More markers nearby

• Camp Collier, C.S.A. — steps away
• Greenleaf Fisk — steps away
• Coggin and Parks Building — steps away
• Welcome William Chandler — steps away