HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

1933 Weatherford City Hall

Weatherford, Parker County, Texas

Marker Inscription

The construction of this city hall created many jobs for the unemployed in Weatherford during the hard times of the Great Depression. Weatherford citizens passed a bond election to provide funds for a new city hall and fire station in 1933, and construction began immediately on this structure, built on land designated early in the century for city hall and fire department use. Dedication ceremonies for the new facility were held on January 16, 1934. The art deco brick structure features vertical corbelled pilasters and stone coping and inserts. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark -1987.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

In the depths of the Great Depression, Weatherford voters passed a 1933 bond to build a combined city hall and fire station—and the project put unemployed townspeople to work. Construction began at once on land long set aside for civic use, and the art deco brick building, with its corbelled pilasters and stone trim, was dedicated in January 1934.

Why it matters

The building stands for a hard-won lesson of the 1930s—that public works could give communities both needed infrastructure and desperately needed jobs when private enterprise faltered.

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Related events

  • · Great Depression

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

First National Bank of Weatherford

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Chartered in 1880, this is among the oldest federally chartered banks still operating in Texas, begun under Parker County industrialist Samuel H. Milliken, who also helped bring the first railroads to Weatherford. Longtime banker Walter S. Fant worked here for 54 years. The institution helped carry the town from the era of frontier raids into an age of industry and agriculture.

Franco-Texan Land Company Building

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Built around 1870, this two-story brick storefront was the beating heart of Weatherford's money and politics as the frontier gave way to the railroad age. It housed the first bank west of Dallas, opened by cattle-fortune banker James Couts, and later the law offices of Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham, who would become governor of Texas. In the 1890s it served the troubled Franco-Texan Land Company, which speculated on the vast stretch of country the Texas and Pacific Railway opened between Weatherford and El Paso.

James Claude Wright House

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This Queen Anne home in Weatherford dates to the late 1890s, most likely built by retired railroad man Robert Lowe as he opened a hardware business nearby, though an 1874 courthouse fire erased the earliest records and old Sanborn maps hint an earlier structure was enlarged. Its original transoms and a stained-glass panel over the front door still survive. In 1940 it passed to James Claude Wright, who built a business selling street signs to small towns and promoting national trade days, and the city bought the house in 2009 to save it from demolition.

Citizens National Bank

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Tennessee-born J.R. Couts (1833–1904) came to Texas in 1858 and, after serving in a frontier guard during the Civil War, drove cattle to California and returned to Weatherford in 1868 with $50,000 in gold. He parlayed that stake through a string of frontier banking partnerships until, in the 1880s, he secured a federal charter for Citizens National Bank and built its stone home on the Courthouse Square in 1885. The bank endured for over a century in the same building, merging with the Parker County National Bank in 1927.