Jasper County Courthouse (Texas No. 54)

Constructed:  1889
Style:  Renaissance Revival
Material:  Originally red brick and later covered with stucco
Interesting fact:  Jasper County was one of the original 23 counties created following the Texas Revolution in 1836.

County seat:  Jasper, Texas, population 8,200
Nickname:  Butterfly Capitol of Texas
Location:  130 miles northeast of Houston, 230 miles southeast of Jot 'em Down, 870 miles east of El Paso, 830 Miles southwest of Jasper, Indiana (those last two mileage figures make for an interesting comparison regarding the great state of Texas)
Interesting fact:  One of the primary locations for recovery of the Space Shuttle Columbia wreckage in February 2003

Whiskers

Babies and Baby Mamas

A few weekends back a neighbor asked if I would feed his dogs and cats for him while he was away for a few days.  The first evening I pulled up to his place his cows were along the driveway checking me out.  I don't think there's any doubt who this baby belongs to.

I'm sure the above baby has the same Baby Daddy as the one above.  A few more generations and the babies will be solid black just like their daddies.

If You Had All the Money in the World ...

... what would you do with it?

I would buy the old Paramount Theater in Marshall, Texas (which just happens to be for sale), rehab it back to its glory days, and show only my favorite movies, such as Gone With the Wind (1939), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Charade (1963), The Graduate (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967),  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Easy Rider (1969), The Godfather (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Sophie's Choice, (1982), Pulp Fiction (1994), Fargo (1996), Good Will Hunting, (1997), The Pianist (2000), The Italian Job (2003),  The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Bridesmaids (2011), Bernie (2011), Whiplash (2014) and at least 50 others.

I'd light up the marquee at night and serve free buttered popcorn and Milk Duds, or Junior Mints if you prefer.

Dreams, dreams.  But it would take a lot of money to fix all the water damage that's quite apparent even on the exterior.

What would you do with an old movie theater?

Iris

We had some beautiful bearded irises growing along our fence lines this spring.  Most of my mother's iris were the traditional purple and yellow, although she had a few hybrid varieties, and I had sent her rhizomes from my iris in Phoenix a number of years back.  None of those bloomed this year.  I'm sure they were varieties which grow best in dryer conditions and there were few dry days in Texas this spring.  I can't tell you the names of any of her iris but if you like flowers, I'm sure you will appreciate these without their names.

The flower above is a frilly pale lavender specimen.

This one is even a paler lavender.

And this pale peach-colored beauty belonged to my grandmother, an avid gardener who has been gone for 44 years.  I'm so happy some of her flowers still exist today.  It's not so fancy or frilly as the flowers we see hybridized these days but I love it's beautiful, muted color and it's very tall, standing well above the other plants in its garden setting.

The bright orange portion on this plant is the beard.

Barn at Ammannsville, Fayette County, Texas

Seen Along the Roadside

Queen Ann's Lace and Vetch

I am leaving today for a week-long trip into Central Texas.  I've posted photos to be published while I'm away but I won't be commenting until I return at the end of the week.

Sandhill Crane

Texas Zoo - Victoria, Texas

Newton County Courthouse (Texas No. 53)

"People stood around the square all night crying and consoling each other.  That courthouse means a great deal to Newton.  It's where we saw our boys off to war and where we had community celebrations.  We mark our time by the clock tower striking."  So said one of the residents of Newton, Texas, in August of 2000 after a catastrophic electrical fire in the attic gutted the 1902 Newton County Courthouse.  All that remained were the outer walls and a few interior walls on the first floor.  The building sat abandoned for six years until restoration work began, being made possible by grants from the Texas Historical Commission and other donations totaling $6 million.

Newton County is the easternmost of Texas' 254 counties.  The county seat, Newton, has a population around 2500 and is the only incorporated town in the county.  Newton is 18 miles west of Merryville, Louisiana, 100 miles southeast of where I live near Garrison, 150 miles northeast of Houston, and 893 miles east of El Paso.

Something whacko just happened on this post.  This post was scheduled for tomorrow but when it published this morning it seems to be combined with the post that was scheduled for today!  I must have somehow put the same date for the scheduling info so today you get two at no charge and there won't be another one tomorrow!  I am going to be out of town next week and I've been trying to to schedule something for each of the days of my absence.  Here it is Friday, I haven't even left yet and I've already screwed up!

Post Office Murals - 8 (Kilgore, Texas)

A few months ago I drove over to Kilgore (about 60 miles northwest of me) to photograph the Post Office murals.  I had the address of the Post Office from the book I had been studying and as I drove up to it, I knew something was wrong.  It was vacant, appeared to be abandoned.  On that day it actually had a chain link fence around it and tall grass.  Weeks later I discovered that the murals were now located in the East Texas Oil Museum and I was able to eventually return.  When the old Post Office was closed the General Services Administration, now responsible for these murals painted throughout the country in the 1930s and '40s, decided to put them in storage in Baltimore.  The citizens of Kilgore were outraged and began a campaign to keep them in their community and after much negotiation the oil museum agreed to take the pantings and care for them in a way that the GSA demanded (humidity-controlled environment, 24-hour security, availability to the public).

There are four separate murals displayed near the ceiling on three walls of a tiny gift shop.  They are difficult to see, much more difficult to photograph, but at least they remain.

This first is called Pioneer Saga and depicts a group of travel-weary settlers stopping by a stream.

Drilling for Oil is extremely large and long.  The lighting was not conducive to a good photo and you can see the details.  Kilgore was the center of the Texas oil boom when oil was discovered in the area in 1930.  I remember even early in the 1950s when the entire town of Kilgore was in a shadow from all the oil derricks and almost every house had lawns decorated with drilling pumpjacks.

 "Music of the Plains" is an irregularly shaped mural illustrating a singer and her accompanist, perhaps representing the development of Texas folk music whose grass roots went on to heavily influence today's country/western music.

The last and my favorite is called Contemporary Youth, romantically portraying a young couple dancing and in the background a boy playing with a model airplane.  The four murals taken together show the transition in the lives of Americans in just a 100-year period.

This group of Post Office murals was painted by Xavier Gonzales (1898-1993) a Spanish-born artist who came to the United States in 1928.  He was paid $2,600 for the four panels, one of the highest prices paid to any of the artists who were commissioned to do Post Office murals.  Another of his murals was painted for the Mission, Texas, Post Office.  His wife, Ethel Edwards, painted a mural for the Lampasas, Texas, Post Office which I hope to see when I travel to that area next week.

The Beauty at High Hill

St. Mary's is considered the queen of the painted churches.  And you can see why.  A massive year-long restoration of the artistry was accomplished in 2011.

Birdman asked if there are any Lutheran churches in Texas.  Yes, Birdman, there are, but between 70 and 90 percent of the Czech immigrants were of the Catholic faith.

Czechs began immigrating to Texas in the 1850s and immigration continued until after the turn of the century.  They came primarily from Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia because of the abundant availability of good, cheap farmland and the Czechs and Germans were instrumental in establishing the heartland of Texas.  By the turn of the century over 250 Czech communities had been established.  Today there are 200,000 Czech Texans, over 13,000 who still speak Czech dialects.

High Hill

The last painted church on our church/wildflower trip by my cousin and I into the Hill Country of Texas last month was to search out St. Mary at High Hill. We had a good map and most of the churches are located in farmland only a few miles from each other.  We knew we were on the right track when we came upon this sign.

After a cresting a small hill, we saw the spire above the treetops.  Surrounded by lush green pastures, small farms and modest homes, it was the perfect day:  a cool spring morning with just a hint of rain and with some dramatic skies all around.

This particular community was settled by German and Czech-Moravian immigrants in 1860.  At one time it boasted a dozen stores, a brewery, five blacksmith shops, a sawmill, three saloons, a dance hall, and a hotel stagecoach stop along an intercontinental stage route.  A public school and a parochial school educated its children.  The first successful cotton seed oil mill in the nation was a prominent industry and employer.  Today all those businesses are gone and High Hill is pretty much considered a ghost town.  The railroad had plans for High Hill, wanting to include it along the route between Houston and San Antonio, but the townspeople declined the offer and the town eventually declined.  Instead the rails went south and others benefited from the economy the railroad brought.  But St. Mary is still there.

Most people who come to see the church wonder what all the hubbub is about, because, after all, it's nothing special, just a pretty little red brick church with a steeple out in the middle of nowhere.  Stop by tomorrow and I'll show you why it's called the Queen of the Painted Churches.

Franklin County Courthouse (Texas No. 51)

This was my destination last Friday when I ran into foul weather.  The crazy thing is, this was my third trip to Mount Vernon, Texas, some 150 miles from my home, to photograph this courthouse.  Now keep in mind that there were other stops along the way, but the round trip values now equate to right at 900 miles to get this photo.  The first time in 2012 when I went, it was surrounded by chain-link fence (see the photo here) and you could see daylight through the gutted building.  It was during the restoration process, accomplished through a grant of $5 million from the Texas State Historical Association for both exterior and interior.  A year and a half later in late 2013 I again went to the courthouse and little progress had been made in the interim.  I didn't even bother with a photograph that time.

So as I'm nearing Mount Vernon, as I mentioned in Friday's post, about four miles out of town I ran into those ominous clouds.  Two miles down the road the rain was blinding and I'm thinking to myself:  I've invested 900 miles of travel and 18 hours of time trying to get a photo of this building.  If I'm not successful, I'm calling it quits.

I pull up to the courthouse, which sits on one side of the courthouse square, an atypical placement, and watched the rain pound down.  I tried rolling the window down and taking a shot out the window but the rear-view mirror was in the way.  Finally after 15 or 20 minutes the rain let up enough that I could actually step out of the vehicle and click a few shots.

There is really very little information about this courthouse.  Franklin is one of the smallest counties in Texas and the county seat, Mount Vernon, has only a little over 2,500 residents.  The courthouse was built in 1912 in the Classical Revival Style, and it has a chiming clock.  That's about it!  In my three visits to Mount Vernon I'm not sure I've ever encountered a person, although I saw a couple of cars while I was there Friday.  You will notice there is only one vehicle parked in front of the courthouse.  If you want someplace quiet, this may be the place to go!

Harrison County Courthouse (Texas No. 2) Revisited

On my day trip last Friday I went through the city of Marshall 65 miles north of here so I felt the urge to stop by to see the beautiful courthouse located there. This is the jewel that fueled my passion for these spectacular, historic buildings.  It was my second courthouse in Texas to photograph and I've been on a mission since.  It was built in 1900 and was designed by my favorite courthouse architect, J. Reily Gordon, long considered one of the master architects of courthouses.  Eighteen of his designs were erected in Texas; twelve remain today.  He also designed the Arizona state capitol building, as well as the Vicksburg, Mississippi, city hall, several buildings in Manhattan, and other courthouses in New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and New York.

The courthouse is now retired from government work and serves as the home of the Harrison County Museum.

My first post of this courthouse appears here and there is another photo taken back in 2013 when I made a special trip on a very cold New Year's Eve to photograph the building when it was decked out with 2 million Christmas lights.  Click on this link for that photo.

Lady Justice stands tall on the courthouse dome.  This photo was obviously zoomed to super-duper capacities.  After looking at it on the computer I was stunned to see that Lady Justice appears to be bare-breasted (as many statutes of Lady Justice are).  This is a VERY conservative area of Texas so I wonder what the residents of Marshall would think if they actually knew they had a half-naked woman exposing herself standing on top of their beautiful courthouse!