Goliad County Courthouse
Goliad, Goliad County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1894. Cost $67,888.95. Limestone and brick from 1870 courthouse were used in this, the fourth one built since county's creation in 1836. Used as hospital after 1902 cyclone. A 1942 storm tore off central clock tower. Enlarged in 1964. Preserving carved staircases, walnut wainscots. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1964.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Completed in 1894 for just under $68,000, Goliad's fourth courthouse reused limestone and brick from an 1870 predecessor, standing as the seat of a county born with the Republic of Texas in 1836. It sheltered the injured after a devastating 1902 cyclone, lost its central clock tower to a 1942 storm, and was enlarged in 1964 with its carved staircases and walnut wainscoting preserved.
Why it matters
Few Texas courthouses have weathered as much history as Goliad's, whose walls carry the county's story from the founding of the Republic through storms and generations of self-government.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Hanging Tree
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For decades in the mid-1800s, this Goliad tree served as an open-air courthouse where sentences were carried out on the spot with rope and a handy limb. Its darkest chapter came during the 1857 "Cart War," when Texas freighters violently attacked Mexican teamsters hauling goods along the road between the coast and San Antonio, a spasm of ethnic and economic violence that killed dozens before the Texas Rangers intervened.
Regulators of Goliad County
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Don Rafael Antonio Manchola
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Born around 1800 to a Spanish family, Rafael Antonio Manchola came to La Bahía in 1822 and married into the powerful de León family, empresarios of the region. He rose to command the presidio, served as alcalde, and sat in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas, where he championed separate statehood, corresponded with Stephen F. Austin, and even secured the town's renaming from La Bahía to Goliad. He died of cholera in 1833, and years later his de León kin were driven from Texas by anti-Mexican sentiment during the Revolution.
Goliad Lodge No. 94 A.F. & A.M.
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Freemasons first met in Goliad in 1851 and won their charter the next year, and since 1854 the lodge has gathered in this rubble-stone building—one of the town's oldest. Its ground floor long did double duty as the local post office and city hall, making the modest structure a hub of civic as well as fraternal life in a community steeped in Texas Revolution history.