Part I: 1890-1910
The November 1890 cornerstone-laying ceremony bridged generations, celebrating a new building to span the ages. The city's eldest resident (71) and first person of Dallas business, Mrs. Sarah Horton Cockrell, was joined by the son and namesake of city-founder John Neely Bryan to commemorate the onset of construction of a grandly Romanesque, fin de siècle monument to jurisprudence. In this new Dallas County courthouse, the community was building for the next century, looking past the Wild West toward an ascendancy of lawful rule and civic process.
"The grandest temple of justice in the southwest," as the paper called it, would be second in Texas only to the Capitol in Austin in height and grandeur. It was built solidly for posterity of granite and sandstone, brick, steel and ceramic tile, with a slate roof and terra cotta ornamentation.
It boasted six large courtrooms and ample space for county services. Half the top floor was devoted to its law library and space for public events. The courtrooms were 40-by-50 feet with 20-foot ceilings and gilded molding. Visitors were greeted by imposing 11-foot-high doorways adorned with beautiful stained glass. Equipped for gas, steam and electricity, with two hydraulically powered elevators, it was as modern as tomorrow's news, and twice as fancy.
"The legal profession was important to Dallas from the very beginning, for its founder was a lawyer," writes Dr. Darwin Payne, author of a history of lawyers in Dallas. Town founder and lawyer John Bryan, and wife Margaret Beeman donated the land for the courthouse square when the city was elected county seat in 1850. All told, five courthouses preceded this new one, the most recent having been lost to flame in February 1890 for the second time.
By January of 1890 Dallas had grown to become the largest city in Texas. When the courthouse was completed in 1892, it quickly became a center of community life-legal, commercial and social. Its clock tolled the hours; its artesian well provided fresh water; its public halls saw weddings and memorials. It was surrounded by drugstores, print shops, boarding houses, farm stores, blacksmiths and feed lots.
These businesses thrived on Estray Day, the first Monday of each month, an occasion for farmers to register livestock, conduct business with the county and with each other. It was a day to catch up on the news on the large bulletin board on the courthouse steps.
Decades later, in 1945, The Dallas Morning News waxed nostalgic about the era. "In the pioneer period, farmers used to visit the courthouse almost every time they came to town. They attended the estray sales and gleaned useful news from the bulletin board and from the gossip of men gathered there. But now estray sales belong to the past and news in published form is brought to the farmers' door by the rural mail carrier."
Known as "Old Red," the courthouse has endured to become the most significant link between the modern metropolis and its frontier past. Its stories document the ebb and flow of civil procedure in a growing land. The very nature of a courthouse makes it a forum for the most enlightened and the most benighted the community can offer-frequently, at the same time. And a larger-than-life building attracts larger-than-life people, with events to match.
Consider Hatton W. Sumners, one of Old Red's early office holders and easily a role model for Horatio Alger's "A Western Boy's Success." In 1895, as a 20-year-old newcomer to Dallas County, Sumners persuaded the Dallas City Attorney to let him "read law" in his office, an alternative to law school. He was admitted to the bar in 1897, and two years later, was elected Dallas County attorney.
Taking office at the age of 25, he launched a vigorous crusade against saloons and gambling interests. So successful were Sumners' efforts that the industries organized to defeat his re-election in 1902. Out of office, he accused them of fraudulent electioneering. The following year, the legislature reformed election law, incorporating some of Sumner's recommendations and he was re-elected in 1904.
When reformer Carry Nation arrived in Dallas to promote temperance at Old Red, Sumners' crusade against vice hit its high point: An amendment to the city charter was soon passed requiring saloons to close between midnight and 6 a.m.
Sumners left the county attorney's office in 1906, and began, in 1912, a 17-term career in US House of Representatives. He was originally Congressman At Large and then represented the Texas 5th from its 1914 establishment. Serving through World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II, he retired as one of the most influential congressional representative and constitutional lawyers in America. He had served on, and chaired, the House Judiciary Committee longer than anyone, before or since. He opposed FDR's court packing plan, but also provided the resolution that allowed SCOTUS justices to retire, rather than simply resign; FDR asked him to draft the constitution for the Philippines.
Sumners remembered his roots well: His official residence in Dallas was a block from Old Red.