“But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county’s circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon, laying its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of the horizon; musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable.” In such elaborated language and distinctive cadences did William Faulkner describe the fictional courthouse in his Requiem for a Nun (1951). Its Oxford inspiration (1871) replaced an 1840 structure burned down by Union troops. The building’s five-bay design (with two-bay wings added to each side in 1953 and the ensemble covered with stucco) and that of its virtual twin (NC8) in Holly Springs have been attributed to Holly Springs architect Spires Boling, whose seven sheets of drawings for the Oxford building, signed “S. Boling Archt.” and dated April 4, 1871, are held at the University of Mississippi Library. More recently, Willis, Sloan, and Trigg of Memphis has been credited with the design (Sloan being Fletcher Sloan, younger half brother of Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan), as their Hardeman County Courthouse (1868) in Tennessee is almost exactly like it.
Of greater significance than this isolated building, however, is the urbanistic effect of the square’s ensemble. The square measures some 350 feet each side and is bounded by mostly one- and two-story brick buildings. Jackson and Van Buren avenues enter tangentially, while Lamar Boulevard approaches at the midpoints and so allows the courthouse to be seen on axis from the north and south. On the east side at 107 Courthouse Square, the red brick Queen Anne former post office and federal building (1885; 1974 remodeled) is now City Hall. The Colonial Revival Neilson’s Department Store (1897) at number 119 features a plaster frieze with delicate wreaths and swags. On the square’s south side, the two-story building (c. 1880; pictured) at 160 Courthouse houses the much-celebrated Square Books. Oxford has recently experienced an influx of real estate investment, bringing about the headlong redevelopment of buildings around the square and threatening to give Faulkner’s brooding environment an air of artificiality.