Donley County Courthouse

When the railroad pulled Clarendon six miles south in 1887, the town's first courthouse, a stone building that had been a hotel, was left behind. The county built a permanent brick and stone courthouse on the new townsite, completed in 1891 to a design by the architects Bulger and Rapp. The Texas Historical Commission calls it the oldest functioning courthouse in the Texas Panhandle.

It is Romanesque Revival, built in red brick banded with white limestone. What sets it apart is that it is asymmetrical: no two sides are alike, an unusual choice for a county courthouse in Texas at the time. It stands in a square of brick streets and shade trees.

For most of the twentieth century it was a smaller building than its architects drew. A tornado in the 1930s damaged it badly enough that the third floor and the tower were taken off. By the end of the century the metal cornice was failing, water was getting in, and bats lived in the attic. The county took the building into the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program, which rebuilt the third floor and restored the exterior, and the work was finished in July 2003. Donley County still conducts its business inside.