The lights of the courthouse

The lamps of the Cass County Courthouse tell a well-lighted story themselves. They are part of an historical narrative visitors might come to hear and locals would be happy to tell.

The lamps are at the four corners of Texas’s oldest county courthouse. They were once auctioned away. A local family gave theirs back to the county and a Houston couple with no longer an interest in Cass County sold theirs back.

The four shine now in their same places. With their soft and warm lamps, Linden sometimes glows at sunset like a little New England village. A fog every now and then would help the imagination appreciate the past.

The recovery of the lamps was largely due to local historian and civic leader Sue Morris Lazara. When the courthouse was being remodeled, she wondered where the lamps and posts might have gone. She knew the lamps were there in 1948. Her mother Charline Morris’s old photo in 1948 showed them at their corner spots. She knew, too, the lamps had been auctioned in 1958.

Lazara kept a keen eye looking for them and one day spotted one on the property of the late Dr. Roy S. Bucy. It was purchased from the property owner. Two others were discovered in the back yard of the Otis Reynolds’ home, and these were donated back to the county by Charles and Lynn Reynolds.

The question became how to restore them as they once were. Only one of the four streetlights had a complete glass globe and fixture. The lamp project became part of a special secondary grant to restore the retaining walls, sidewalks and grounds of the courthouse.

With the help of county commissioners and others, a matching grant was obtained for the courthouse exterior and grounds. The county’s part of the $200,000 grant would be $100,000. Lazara contacted Linden native and benefactor Bill Hines who gave $90,000 toward the match. The remaining $10,000 was donated by local citizens within the short one-week deadline.

“I think the improvements in roads and buildings in those years might have led to the abandoning of the lamps because other, modern street lighting adopted by the Texas Highway Department came in at that time,” Lazara said.

But to fulfill their history, the lamps had to be restored to perfection. The tapered posts with their shapely fluting, wide at the base and narrow at the top, had to be re-set in concrete at exactly the same spots. The solid bronze caps, cast to resemble a Greco-Roman helmet, were restored and wired to underground circuitry, part of the building’s 2012 allnew electrical system. The frosted globes of three of the four lamps were replicated based upon the one intact, European style gas-lamp globe.

From photos of various periods, it appears that these lampposts originated in 1934, when the county made substantial repairs following a major courtroom fire of 1933, Lazara estimated when giving background to this story.

Linden’s town square has a genuine lamplight look about it now. The lamplights bathe the state’s oldest county courthouse.