Courthouses of Hardin County

The Handbook of Texas says a log courthouse was finished at Hardin in 1859. The site courthouses.co adds a second Hardin building from 1872, which burned in 1886 as the county seat moved to Kountze. An 1884 vote to move the seat had failed by eleven votes. In 1904 Herman and Augustus Kountze, the brothers the town was named for, offered land for a courthouse site there, and the Handbook records that the domed courthouse was later replaced by a three-story, $1.5 million building in 1959.

What the plaque says

Courthouses of Hardin County Hardin County was created in 1858. The first official Hardin County building was probably a two-story log building that burned about 1886. Early county records were destroyed in the conflagration. In 1887, architect Frank Smith of Beaumont designed a two-story frame structure built in Kountze by local contractor W. B. Pedigo. A safe was positioned inside the structure and the walls were built around it. The building was replaced in 1905. J. B. Hooks moved the old courthouse across the street to become the J. B. Hooks Abstract Company. A new masonry courthouse was erected in 1905. It was designed by Andrew P. Bryan and built by M. J. Lewman and Company. Domed in the tradition of the nation's capitol and the Texas State Capitol, the edifice was built of native stone from the Pecos area of West Texas. Salmon-colored brick was imported from the Hydraulic Press Brick Company of St. Louis, and the columns and bases were crafted by Bedford Stone Company. A carbide lighting system was installed in 1918. A three-story colonial-style sandstone building was erected with four 24-foot two-story columns front and back and 16 smaller columns supporting the dome. This building served until 1958. A modern facility was planned by Dickson-Dickson and Associates and built by Lumbeck Construction Company in 1958. The 1905 edifice was destroyed in 1960. At the end of the 20th century, the 1958 courthouse was still in service and the 1887 building continued to stand, now the home of law offices, near the courthouse square. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Big Thicket National Preserve — 7.5 mi
  Start at the Kountze visitor center, where rangers sort the preserve's scattered units for you, and learn why Congress made this 1974 string of pearls the country's first national preserve.
• Village Creek State Park — 13 mi
  A 2,466-acre state park on one of the few free-flowing creeks in Texas, with a launch for the Village Creek Paddling Trail, boat rentals and sandy-upland trails in the Big Thicket.
• McFaddin-Ward House — 23 mi
  A Beaux-Arts Colonial Revival mansion finished in 1906 and lived in by one family for 75 years, with free guided tours of three furnished floors, the carriage house and gardens.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 27 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• General Braxton Bragg, C. S. A. — steps away
• Hardin County — steps away
• Old Hardin — 2.4 mi
• Richard E. Jackson — 7.4 mi