Presidio County Courthouse

When Presidio County voters moved the county seat to Marfa in 1885, the commissioners advertised for courthouse designs as far away as the San Antonio newspapers. The San Antonio architect Alfred Giles and the contractor J. H. Britton were the leading bidders, and in 1886 Britton won the contract. The building closely resembles the courthouse Giles designed for El Paso County that same year, since torn down, and historians are still not sure whose drawings Britton built from. Giles got the county jail next door as a consolation, and it held prisoners until 1985.

The courthouse was finished for New Year's Day 1887, and the county celebrated with a grand ball inside. By 1919 the commissioners had to forbid dancing and sleeping in it. It is three stories of brick and stone, an Italianate body with Second Empire pavilions at the corners under tall mansard roofs, iron cresting and big dormers. The cornices, pediments, mansards and dome are pressed metal, light and durable and made to pass for stone. On the dome stands a statue of Justice. Her scales and the blade of her sword are gone, shot away, the story goes, by a citizen who complained that there was no justice in Presidio County.

The red brick was plastered over in the early twentieth century. With a grant from the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program the outside was restored to its 1929 look and the inside to 1915, and the building was rededicated on January 5, 2002. It is still the county's working courthouse, open on business days.