This courthouse replaced a building of 1883 designed by W. C. Dodson that was similar to his Parker County Courthouse (WC1). Lang and Witchell’s Cooke County Courthouse (DD14), built two years earlier, employed Prairie Style ornamentation for the interior, but here Barglebaugh brought it to the exterior as well.
A cross plan and symmetrical massing were fairly conventional for courthouses of this period, as was ordering the building on a raised basement of rusticated granite, a rusticated brick first story, and second and third floors unified with columns. Barglebaugh broke the classical mold at the corners, where broad, tower-like piers rise above the entablature to stepped caps. Ionic capitals are abstracted, and Sullivanesque pendants are draped across the entablature over pilasters. The dominant feature is the brick tower, equivalent to four stories in height, square in shape with chamfered corners, a pair of louvered vertical slots on each face, and a stone top story with Wrightian geometric ornamentation cascading down the corners to frame the clock faces. A smooth dome raised on a short drum concludes the tower. Dominating the interior is the six-story central atrium that rises into the tower. It is lined with Georgia Creole marble (gray and white with coarse black and dark blue veining) and has Sullivanesque ornament and an octagonal art glass skylight. The courthouse was rehabilitated in 2007 with funding from the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program.