Smith County as a 19th Century Legal Center
Tyler, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Soon after its establishment in 1846, Smith County became an important legal center in East Texas. The first legal proceeding to take place in the county was a district court session held in an abandoned one-room log cabin in Tyler in December 1846. In 1850, after the State Legislature decided the Supreme Court should meet not only in Austin but throughout the state, Tyler was made one of the court's three seats. The Supreme Court began meeting here the following year. In 1851 Tyler was also made a U. S. District Court seat. It has served as such since that time, interrupted only by the Civil War when Confederate District Court was held here. Because the Supreme Court was overworked hearing both civil and criminal appeals, the new Texas Constitution of 1876 established the Court of Criminal Appeals to relieve the Supreme Court of its criminal jurisdiction. Rotating at the same time and to the same places as the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals met in Tyler from its inception. Years later, state laws were passed that moved the Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals permanently to Austin. The courts continued to operate in Tyler until 1891 and 1908, respectively.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Soon after its 1846 founding, Smith County grew into a legal hub of East Texas, its first district court convening in an abandoned log cabin in Tyler in 1846. When the legislature spread the state Supreme Court across the state in 1850, Tyler became one of its three seats and also a U.S. District Court seat, and later hosted the new Court of Criminal Appeals created by the 1876 constitution. These high courts continued to sit in Tyler until they were consolidated permanently in Austin by the early twentieth century.
Why it matters
It illustrates how a frontier county town once shared in the highest reaches of Texas justice before the state centralized its courts.
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Nearby & related markers
Smith County Jail, 1881
Tyler, TX
Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner and builder Henry Kane erected this Italianate structure in 1880–81 as Smith County's fourth jail, its stuccoed walls scored to imitate cut stone and dressed with elaborate window molds and classical beltcourses. A second story added in 1894 doubled its cell space. After a new jail replaced it in 1916, the building found a second life as the Lewis Hotel until 1986.
First Baptist Church of Tyler
Tyler, TX
Founded in 1848 with just six charter members meeting in a log-cabin courthouse, this congregation summoned worshippers by blowing a horn in the young town of Tyler. Fire twice destroyed its buildings, in 1855 and again in 1882, before the congregation settled on North Bois d'Arc Street and dedicated a sanctuary in 1889. The present Beaux Arts church, with its massive columns and pedimented portico, rose in 1913, making this one of the oldest continuously existing Baptist churches in Texas.
Marvin Methodist Church
Tyler, TX
Organized in 1848 by the Reverends Sam Box and Alexander Douglas, Marvin Methodist was the first church in Smith County, meeting first in a log cabin on the courthouse square and then a blacksmith shop before building alongside the Masons in 1852. The present sanctuary, raised in 1890 and now Tyler's oldest church, was named in 1891 for Bishop Enoch Mather Marvin, a Confederate chaplain renowned across Missouri and Texas for his powerful preaching. Expanded repeatedly through the twentieth century, the congregation has been led by 45 pastors.
John B. and Ketura Douglas House
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Built around 1873, this was the home of John B. Douglas—a Civil War veteran, merchant, and city official—and his wife Ketura "Kettie" Walker Douglas, a church and civic leader, in a fashionable neighborhood just outside old Tyler. As the family's fortunes rose, they enlarged and elaborated the house in stages, its exuberant clapboard, shingles, and carved brackets marking it as high Victorian design. It survives as the only known Tyler house to blend Italianate and Second Empire detailing.