Jefferson County Courthouse

The present courthouse is the county's fourth. Fred C. Stone and Augustin Babin designed it in Art Deco, finished in 1931, and Beaumont sculptor Matchett Herring Coe made its frieze panels and other architectural sculpture. Floors eight through thirteen once held the county jail, and their barred windows still show. The building joined the National Register of Historic Places on June 17, 1982, and became a State Antiquities Landmark in 1992. A $22 million restoration finished in 2011, replacing a 1940s copper roof with a multicolored tile roof that resembles the original.

What the plaque says

Jefferson County Courthouse The first county building constructed at this site was a jailhouse completed in 1838, two years after the organization of Jefferson County. Located on land acquired from Nancy Tevis, a pioneer settler of the area, it also housed county offices and courts. When the commissioners court outgrew the facility, sessions were held in private homes. The first courthouse here was completed in 1854. Built by John A. Beaumont, it was a two-story square structure surrounded by a six-foot picket fence. Baptist and Methodist congregations conducted Sunday services in the building and during the Civil War it was leased to D. T. Inglehart, a Confederate surgeon, for use as a hospital. A second courthouse was constructed in 1893, twelve years after the incorporation of Beaumont. Designed by E. T. Heiner, it was a three-story red brick building with white trim. Following the area oil boom of the 1920s it proved inadequate to meet the needs of the growing population and was replaced by the present brick courthouse in 1931. Designed by Fred Stone and A. Babin, the fourteen-story building features art deco styling in the use of sculpted ornamentation and marble interior work. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McFaddin-Ward House — 1.4 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 — 3.3 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.
• Village Creek State Park — 12 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.
• Museum of the Gulf Coast — 17 mi
  Port Arthur's regional museum in a former bank building: fossils, Native Americans, the petroleum story, a 125-foot history mural and Halls of Fame for musicians, athletes and artists.

More markers nearby

• Port of Beaumont — steps away
• William G. "Bill" Hall — steps away
• Henry Millard — 0.2 mi
• Beaumont: Lumber Mill City of the Nineteenth Century — 0.2 mi