Lee County Courthouse
Giddings, Lee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Designed by J. R. Gordon along lines similar to New York State Capitol and several buildings at Harvard University. Classified as Richardsonian Romanesque style, after the famous Louisiana-born architect Henry H. Richardson. Built by Sonnefield, Emmins and Abright of San Antonio, 1899. Replaced first courthouse, which burned 1897. Located on crest of divide separating the Colorado and Brazos River basins.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Completed in 1899, the Lee County Courthouse rose after fire destroyed the county's first courthouse in 1897. Designed by J. R. Gordon in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style—named for the influential Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson—it echoes public buildings of its era with heavy stone and rounded arches. Its builders, a San Antonio firm, set it on the high ground dividing the Colorado and Brazos river basins, a commanding perch for the seat of county government.
Why it matters
Texas's grand turn-of-the-century courthouses were declarations of civic permanence and prosperity, and Lee County's is a fine example of the Romanesque revival that swept American public architecture in the late 1800s.
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Related people
- · J. R. Gordon
- · Henry Hobson Richardson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.
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