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Tarrant County Courthouse

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1895, Gunn and Curtiss; 1983 restored, Burson, Hendricks and Walls and Ward Bogard and Associates; 2012 restored, Arthur Weinman. 100 W. Weatherford St.

The Tarrant County Courthouse, set in a double-block square terminating the view north on Main Street, caused planner Edmund Bacon of Philadelphia to call this one of the finest urban vistas in the United States. The four-story building, a fine example of a non-academic classicism, is constructed of Texas Sunset Red granite, the same stone from the Cold Spring Granite Company used to build the State Capitol in Austin a decade earlier. The contractor was Probst Construction of Chicago, and the construction cost was considered sufficient justification by the citizens of Tarrant County for voting out the county commissioners responsible for its construction.

Weinman’s restoration of the dome in 2012 continued the work of architect Ward Bogard in the early 1980s. The demolition in 2014 of the Civil Courts wing (1958, 1983) on the west side of the courthouse reestablishes the original urban symmetry of the structure in relation to the Main Street axis.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "Tarrant County Courthouse", [Fort Worth, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-02-FW1.

Print Source

Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019, 200-201.

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