Sunday in Court- Ellis County

Ellis County Courthouse

Waxahachie, Texas (Population 29,621)

Built: 1897

Photographed: 2005

This is the one that started it all. In my opinion it's the most awesome courthouse in Texas. Not only is it an awesomely foreboding building, but there are 45 faces hidden in the facades. It is also one of only about 40 houses in Texas that have a functioning clock and bell tower. The architect (J. Riely Gordon) designed several houses in Texas and he was a straight running badass for dreaming up a building this cool looking. I also dig the fact that it is still a fully-functioning government building; a lot of towns have relegated their historic courthouses to landmark or museum status. Not this one. And that's cool. 

Hey, YOUR HONOR, maaaan....

All of this started off with a courthouse.

Back in the formative years of the great State of Texas (yeehaw), something as innocuous as a courthouse could mean the difference between prosperity and death for a town and caused literal battles to be fought between neighboring communities (I'll get to that later). Nowadays they do not really have a whole lot of significance unless you have to pay a parking ticket (or that CCTV camera you didn't see caught you whipping it out and pissing all over that blue Toyota last week and you had to go to trial for public lewdness; I know who you are and we need to talk), but back in the day they were sort of a big deal.

I took some pics of a couple of the more attractive courthouses in the north-central part of the state and decided (much like the lunatic that I am) that it would be a great addition to my "bucket list" to challenge myself to photograph all of them. It's been on these road trips that I've seen most of the cool shit I've taken pictures of that you will see on this blog. Again, I never said I was normal.

If you're a nerd like I am and you do questionable shit like this, you develop a bit of a taste for these things; a palette, if you will; you develop an appreciation for the good ones and a distaste for the ugly ones, and a curiosity as to why so many great looking 19th Century buildings got uglified (yes, I made that one up too and no, you can't use it.) in the 20th. You also get to where you can guess about when they were built based upon the architecture (the Depression-era architects loved themselves some Art-Deco). Being an absolute geek, I've come up with a rating system for the courthouses I've photographed (good God, how did I ever get laid?):

E- Excellent: This is the highest rating. "E" level houses are beautiful buildings, sit on attractive courthouse lawns, and maintain the original integrity from when they were first constructed. Most "E" courthouses date back to the 19th to early 20th Centuries and are Gothic, Romanesque or Classical in architecture.

G- Good: These buildings are attractive but not necessarily awesome. Most are of Classical architecture and generally nice to look at but definitely not ever going to be seen on the cover of Texas Monthly.

M- Meh: Not ugly, not attractive, just, well, "meh".

BDEBBB- "Boring Depression-Era Bland Brick Box". Name says it all.

RBR- Ruined By Renovation: These buildings started off pretty but were dragged through the Ugly Forest sometime in the mid-20th Century. When possible I'll include archived pics of what they used to look like before they got jacked up.

W- WTF?: The opposite of "E". These buildings look less like centers of government and more like nursing homes or libraries. There are only a couple of these but yeah, they're hideous.

I'll post a courthouse a week which will keep me busy, and y'all will have plenty to check out because there are 254. Jesus; why couldn't I have picked something less elaborate?

Right, I'm a nerd.

Shit....

Out of Gas- Week of August 9

We only really notice them when we really need one and can't find it. From their beginnings as auto service depots to their current status as a one stop shop for everything from sodas to ranch-flavor CornNuts and everything in between, gas stations are as ubiquitous and omnipresent as fire hydrants and traffic lights. We all have our favorites; we choose them by fuel brand, cleanliness, location, broad selection of porno magazines and flavors of Cheetos.

Like everything, however, these street corner fixtures eventually outlive their usefulness (much like the other notable street corner fixtures) and end up abandoned and left to fall into decay. Every city and town has them, but its the ones in the smaller hamlets that I like to photograph. I suppose it's all a part of my fascination with history and how it evolves. Anyway, each Friday I will post a handful of these lost stations; here is the first installment.

Close your eyes and smell the beef jerky....

Bardwell

Henderson

Albany

Silver Lake

Kilgore

Putnam- Almost A Ghost

When one hears the words "ghost town", they generally tend to picture something out of a sleepy, 2 AM episode of Gunsmoke; rotting storefronts along a boardwalk in a dusty plain somewhere, littered with tumbleweeds, beer bottles, rattlesnakes and rusting Model A's. Having been all over the state of Texas and visited many of them, I can assure you this is not the case. Very few ghost towns became that way overnight; most of these communities suffered long and agonizing demises, struggling to maintain viability while leaking population and relevance at the seams knowing that the end is inevitable. Many of them lived and died by the railroad (Sherwood), others were coal towns who fell to the mighty sword of Big Oil in the Twentieth Century (Thurber), and others were destroyed by nature (Indianola). Of all of these vanishing blips on the map that I have come across, very few of them have come anywhere near as close to effecting me in a manner as deeply and profoundly as the tiny Taylor County community of Putnam.

A typical railroad town, Putnam dates back to 1890 (back when it was known by the decidedly more badass name of "Catclaw"), with the arrival of the Texas and Pacific Railroad. It reached its peak in 1940 when just under 500 Putnamites (Putnamans?) called it home, but began to decline as the century wore on and though it remains incorporated as a city (a "city" in the same sense that Lady Gaga is an "artist"), by the 2000 Census the population had fallen to just 88, making it one of the least populous incorporated places in Texas. As fascinating as this may be (right?), it's what Putnam has that sets it apart more than what it does not have; most ghost towns I have visited are the skeletal remains of once prosperous communities. Putnam, however, is still dying.

 A short but tidy high street area faces IH-20 and is lined with shops, but the "city hall" and post office appear to be the only businesses still in business in Putnam.

This house was particularly poignant.

It had a doghouse....

....and was still littered with belongings. 

Note the hat on the floor in front of the chair. It isn't hard to picture an oilfield worker coming in from sixteen back breaking hours on a rig, throwing his hat to the floor and kicking back in his rocking chair.

It wasn't until I was standing in front of the small pink house that this struck me: Putnam was the first "ghost town" I had ever visited that had sidewalks. Most of these places are faded remnants of the distant past: old, obscure, lost. To see a place in full death rattle that possessed modern conveniences such as paved sidewalks was oddly moving.

Forreston

If you're ever driving on US 77 between Waxahachie and Italy and drop a Cheeto on the floorboard, by the time you reach down and pick it up, you will have passed through the entirety of the tiny community of Forreston. Dating back to the 1850's, Forreston was never really more than a blip on the map; at its peak it claimed 250 residents (as of 2010 an estimated 240 are still there); but today it has the odd distinction of being home to Bon Ton Vintage, which claims to have the largest selection of vintage clothing in all of Texas. 

Uncle Jessie is buried there, too. Which is way cool.

The Baker Hotel

You can see it in the distance for miles rolling into Mineral Wells along US 180; a dark, imposing hulk jutting out of the ground like a stubborn old farmer, refusing to leave his land even though their days of bearing profitable crops are long gone. Crumbling and deteriorating, its wonderful architecture falling into waste under the heat of the North Texas sun is almost reminiscent of the wreck of the Titanic; you can tell she was once the cream of her crop but the surrender to the forces of nature has left little more than a shell. The Baker Hotel is long since quiet, but in her day was a top-tier destination from everyone from politicians to famous criminals (which I suppose are pretty much the same thing).

Mineral Wells isn't exactly thought of as a hot tourist destination, but in the early years of the Twentieth Century, it was known nationwide for its well-water; legend had it that it was able to lessen the effects of psychological issues and the like (turns out the well water possessed unusually high amounts of the anti-psychotic Lithium, which would later go on to be a popular medication as well as a notable Nirvana song). Looking to cash in on the healing effects of the so-called (and wonderfully politically incorrect) "crazy water". Hotel magnate T.B. Baker came to town with a bold and possibly even nutty plan: to build a hotel so large and grand that it would be a destination for people all over the world, not just the state of Texas. So in 1925, with $150,000 in locally obtained funds, he broke ground on what would be his largest hotel to date: the 14-story Baker Hotel. 

What made this nuttier than a squirrel turd was the fact that Mineral Wells had a permanent population of around 6,000 at the time and was not necessarily a prime hunk of real-estate for a skyscraper, but that didn't stop Crazy Old Ted (which may or may not have been his nickname; I don't have time to research these things). Even though it opened mere weeks after the Crash of 1929, the opening extravaganza was a rollicking party. It had the first outdoor swimming pool in the southwest and by the '40s was fully air-conditioned; it really was a top-notch joint. Rumor had it that even Bonnie and Clyde (if you don't know who they are, well just go ahead and stay off my blog because you're dead to me) stayed there at least once.

After many cycles of boom and bust, the Baker closed its doors for good in 1972 and has stood vacant ever since. Many attempts to rehabilitate it have come and gone over the years and it's a shame because it's an utterly fascinating building. If you're ever in Mineral Wells, I highly urge you to check it out. It's not like you can miss it. 

Vanishing Texas?

Texas is big.

801 miles tip to tip, 773 miles end to end, 267,000 square miles of everything from deserts to oceans, mountains to tabletop-flat plains; rolling hills to piney woods and sandy beaches to soggy marshland.
Name something and we probably have a version of it specific to the great state of Texas: birds, rocks, brands of soup, nuts; we're always looking to put our names on shit. Texas is like the KISS of the American states;we're shameless self-promoters who are very proud of where we live and by God are not afraid to let you know about it.

And for good reason, I suppose; history has been kind to the Lone Star State. When the economy took a cannonball off the high dive in '08 we stayed remarkably stable; people have been flocking from all over (who am I kidding; Californians have been flocking) to hungrily snap up our jobs and clog our highways and streets, spreading the love for all things vegan from Amarillo to Zapata (okay, they've been coming to Austin; I just couldn't resist the cheesy A-Z thing. My blog; you can do better, start your own). A list of the fastest growing cities and metro areas in the US reads like a Texas road map; tiny once unremarkable places like Frisco, Kyle, Allen and McKinney are experiencing explosive growth and the Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin-Round Rock and Houston-Sugar Land megalomaniopolises (yes, I made that word up) are spreading like cancerous tumors, swallowing every small, quaint community in their paths and infecting them with strip malls and WalMarts faster than infrastructure can keep up. It's truly an irony; people move to these so-called "exurbs" to get away from the city, and then proceed to bring the city with them. Yet another reason why people get on my nerves so badly, but I'm getting ahead of myself; more on that later.

The economic history of Texas is a wild and varied one; before the advent of the microchip and all it hat wrought (for better and worse), Texas' money was largely of the agriculture and petrochemical variety. In the early 20th Century, when oil was discovered throughout the state, towns either sprang up out of nothing or doubled (even tripled) in population seemingly overnight bursting at the seams with people looking to make a buck. Naturally, this business is cyclical and with every boom there is the inevitable bust and what goes up fast, well, it comes down really goddamned hard. Sleepy communities burst into flaming badassness as rollicking boomtowns only to become half-empty ghosts only a few years later, with nothing remaining of the glory days but crumbling buildings and forgotten names and faces, fading into the past with the dreams of yesterday's opportunists.

That's the Texas I'm interested in.

Not the glitzy glamour of Dallas or the "Cowboy-Up!" grit of Fort Worth; no Austin hobobhemian hipsters (or whatever they call themselves) or Tejano kick in San Antonio; and, well, whatever the hell is in Houston; none of that. Texans love to show our pretty side, but there is an ugly one just on the other buttcheek. No, I'm not talking about the urban blight or suburban decay; I'm talking about the places that time simply forgot. Places that still try to hang on in spite of the fact that their best days are long past. Not ghost towns, mind you (even though I find those pretty badass as well and will likely post about a few now and then); I mean the places and things who are still dying, the ones that still serve some sort of purpose yet have all long since burned all the quality gas in the tank and are coughing along on the varnish that's pooled at the bottom. To a crazy person like me, it's all a reminder that no matter what it looks like on the outside, nothing is permanent; everything you see around you, from the monitor on your desk to the roof over your head, will someday be just as much of a memory as cheap gas and self-respect.

So here we go...let's watch something die, shall we?