Thoughts From the Front Porch

Since it has a nice little part in the story, being the site of the only murder trial ever faced by Byrd Richardson, I’ve become fascinated (my family might say “obsessed”) by our original courthouse building. Like most early parts and people of our hometown, the 1902 courthouse has escaped my memory, probably because it was never there. The reason my contemporaries clearly remember the faces and facades of our town before 1957, while I don’t, may very well be that I was too nearsighted to see them. I remember how everything looked after I put on my first pair of glasses at the age of nine. It was a big shock to realize that everybody else could always see the leaves on the trees. But by that time, the old courthouse was gone. I just missed it. It was replaced by the modern one in 1956.

When I “went to looking” for a photograph* of the 1902 courthouse, a friend pointed out this photo on this very website. Sometimes I still feel a bit nearsighted.

Old Courthouse

One wonders, when first considering this picture, what was wrong with the old courthouse? What was so bad about it that it had to come down after only fifty years or so and be replaced? The old one was much more classic in its basic design., though it wasn’t Greek-Revival. And quintessential southern courthouses so often are, as if county seats were longing in concert with the residents for some non-existent, Romantic, idealistic and long-gone past. Our old one was certainly more in the neighborhood of a proper southern courthouse than the one we got later. It was trying to be French Second Empire, another kind of revival of another kind of past. And it was more nostalgic at least than the mid-fifties, mid-century modern, German cousin of prisons we had next. It was lately “gussied up” to become the renovated faux-antique building we have now. But after considering the oldest for a moment, some of its flaws become become fairly clear. It looks as if it were put together by a committee.

The original courthouse committee I imagine as Mr. Gearing, the first mayor, and Mother and Father McIntosh, as the arbiters of all things social and proper. They were new to town at the time and thought a lot of themselves, an attitude which oddly always seems to impress people. Surely there were some county natives involved too, though they may not have been bold enough to speak up. Could be, the mayor’s wife also sat in.

Someone, perhaps the mayor and his wife, came in with a fantasy of French Second Empire style. Ever since the Marquis de La Fayette helped us defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781, all things French were deemed superior in America, at least until the second World War. (Come to think of it, the attitude the French took towards us after the war may have been what turned the town against the courthouse.) Our ancestors in the 19th century gave their children French names, although almost no one in Alabama pronounced them as the French did. So they spelled a daughter’s name Etoile, with accented ‘e’, which is French for “Star,” and which the French would pronounce something like Eh-TWA. But the family would call her E-tool all her life just the same. Or they’d take a French name for their boy, such as Henri, and instead of calling him Ahn-ree, he’d be forever Hen-rye. Who, in nineteenth-century Alabama, had ever heard French spoken?

Probably only Mother and Father McIntosh. I wouldn’t be surprised if they took the Gearings aside and made suggestions that such French-inspired architecture was the latest fashion. They were, I’m afraid, rather late, by fifty or a hundred years. The 1902 courthouse building was symmetrically block-shaped with tall semi-arched windows balanced on all sides. It was built of darkish brick. A Mansard roof rose up from the squareness of the building itself, with a cupola centered on top. The idea of Second Empire style is to suggest a regal altitude. And attitude too. Elevation of stature was the point.

But though the entrance shown in the photograph is centered as it should be, it is anything but the elegantly proportioned, slim-columned portico it should be. It is a squat white block monstrosity, arched in a heavy way, with a incongruous flat, stepped roof. It looks like a bit like a thick-thighed Budda, weighing the building down. It’s sort of blots out the rest of the building and it’s difficult to see anything else. It’s a horror, but you can’t take your eyes off it, like witnessing a train wreck. Directly above it is another flattened arch of white block inlaid in the building’s facade to repeat the Budda motif. It’s meant, I suppose, to direct the eye above, to what might be a flat clock face. Perched above all, in the center of the roof, is a rather large cupola, exactly the same disproportionate size as the stoop. But it looks more like a widow’s walk by-the-sea or a guard tower at a frontier fort or a well house a mile out of town than any Second Empire accoutrement.

In my researches I’ve found a 1930 Sanford Fire Insurance Company map of our town, which pictures a bird’s eye view of every house and shack, to scale.  It’s a drawing, of course, of simple building footprints, and not blueprints unfortunately. But it’s not so disordered a reality as GoogleEarth. The1902 courthouse sat centered east and west on the same entire block of town as our current building, rather more toward the north side of the block and away from the main street, so the front lawn to the south was more capacious. In the north east corner of the block, behind the building, was a hundred-thousand-gallon water tower. In the northwest corner was the jailhouse, just 12 feet square and not fenced. It was placed so that those inside could see nothing much from the windows, except the children going to and from the schoolhouse across the street and on the corner to the east.

The old courthouse sat, as the new one does, on the top of what seems to be a square hill, too conveniently risen and flat on top to have been a construction of nature. The plan for the building itself seems to have been father to that manmade, perfectly balanced rise from street level. They were going for vertical importance. Drive around our state to other small town county seats. You won’t often see courthouses looming from a higher elevation than the town at large.

Changing of the lay of the land could have been planned as a “cost-effective” means to give the building, and the laws it represented, added importance. Maybe it was meant to suggest a boundless, ever-upward future. That was a theme of the times. It does make the building upon it seem taller, even now. Anyone who’s ever been interviewed by a person in a tall chair behind a big desk, while sitting way down in front, will understand the purpose of such a lofty vantage point. It is to intimidate the people below and maintain in them that false sense of inferiority to their “betters.” Mother and Father McIntosh would’ve been in favor of that. But moving all that earth for the purpose doesn’t seem cost effective. Unless they used prison labor.

Prisoners were sometimes bought out of incarceration, I’m told, or rented for their labor in those days. Workers could be procured for a one-time fee paid to the state and kept for the remainder of their lives. A general rule back then, when looking for house servants, was to stay away from those imprisoned for thievery. Because a thief doesn’t change his stripes, as it were, and you’d never be able to trust him. Look for a man who’d murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy, they said. He won’t be likely to kill again.

Prisoners could be “leased” in Alabama as late as 1924, when the state legislature outlawed the practice. At the time it was banned, it was earning the state a million dollars a year. I imagine it took quite a legislative brouhaha to put the state out of the prisoner leasing business. Alabama was the last state in the union to abandon this source of revenue. But in 1902, it would have been cheap and easy to rent a few dozen laborers from the prison system and have them move the earth, a shovel-full at a time.

The first town fathers couldn’t have known in 1890 that there’d be a second courthouse on that square. On the other hand, there it is, a handy square in the center of town, available for a courthouse. Could be, they did know. They certainly knew where the junction of the railroads was going to be. Otherwise, the established town of Eden, just a mile or two to the west, would have been just as good a place for them.

Our principal founder looked down from New York to Alabama and chose a spot to found his town, then he bought the site. His family happened to be in the railroad business. A junction nearer the river could have made more commercial sense. Selma had the river transportation commerce and then the railroad came. Same with Tuscaloosa, Demopolis, Montgomery, Eufaula. But not our town. Get you a 19th-century map* and look at that little iron horse dogleg to where we are. Would’ve made more sense to put the railroad through Cropwell where they had river traffic already. Where the cotton was being grown. But our founder didn’t own Cropwell, he owned a little piece up the road a ways. And somehow or other, the railroad junction came to us.

*(Here’s some: historical maps)

The point was to lay out a town and make a killing in real estate on their insider trading knowledge. Unfortunately for our principal founder, it didn’t work out that way. He was caught in the depression of the 1890s in a bank fraud scandal in New York. And he went to prison. He was later pardoned, though, and lived out the remainder of his life on his lavish old family estate in New Rochelle (that’s way up north) enjoying the country and holding lavish dog shows. And the town he owned was just about abandoned till 1900, when another investor thought of building a cotton mill and bought the town at a reasonable price.

A decade after its layout and beginning, our town was designated the second county seat. Look at an early twentieth county map, and you’ll see the obvious problem we had here. Railroad tracks lay along every possible route between towns, except from our town to Ashville. The reason was simple. It wasn’t possible to build a railroad to traverse Backbone Mountain. You couldn’t get there from here. If the first town planners, those who bought the land and laid out the town, knew where future railroads would be, wouldn’t they know where they wouldn’t be as well? Yes. It is possible they set aside a large central block just for that purpose.

The size of the courthouse square itself is unusually large. Logically, it has to be as   wide as the blocks on two opposing sides.While you’re out driving around to other county seats in our state, notice most towns were laid out in smaller blocks with larger lots, with whole squares dedicated to schools and libraries. Not so in our town. The purpose from the beginning in 1890 was to enrich the owners as quickly as possible. Of course, roads and sidewalks are more expensive in such towns, because there are, by necessity, more linear feet of them.

In Talladega, founded much earlier, the courthouse square is smaller, because the town was laid out with twelve smaller blocks in the center, and increasingly larger blocks as you move from the center in any direction. This provides more street-front shop space downtown and more spacious lots in the neighborhoods. But in our town, the first high school was alloted only half a block’s space and was just to the north and east of the courthouse. A block further north was the “classroom building” where the elementary students went to school. There was no thought of a library.

I imagine the architect, if there was one, eventually threw up his hands in disgust and let the committee go off in all the directions that it wished. Why Second Empire anyway, except for the French-ness of it? Because it was the second courthouse in the county? Because the place had changed hands and come back from the brink of being a ghost town?  It was in a way the second coming of our town, with a second family at the helm taking us in a more fortunate direction.

Whatever the reasons, whatever the flaws, the Second Empire Courthouse gave way in 1956 to something entirely new. A courthouse designed by Martin J. Lide, the same architect who’d drawn the plans for Kilby Prison in 1924. It was known as the most elaborate prison in the South in its day. A “monolithic concrete structure” with a concrete roof laid on steel. And walls topped with four strands of barbed wire, carrying 6,600 volts of electricity. There’s a hint to what our new courthouse looked like, but without the barbed wire, of course.

On November 1,1951, Byrd Richardson was arrested and taken to the jail across the street from the old courthouse. He remained there until his bond hearing, in that courthouse, on November 16. Now Richardson was no doubt familiar with the jailhouse. He’d been taken there drunk and disorderly many a time, but was always released right away to his daddy or his friends. Never before had he been kept longer than one night. Those fifteen days and nights were a new experience for him.  I like to think his situation was uncomfortable. I like to think he worried quite a lot during all those days and hours when he had little else to do. The sheriff came under quite a bit of pressure to release him, but, bless his heart, he stood his ground.

From cell across the street, Byrd could see the courthouse building. I’d like to imagine him worrying that he might be convicted, thinking about “Yellow Mama.” But I sincerely doubt he ever gave it thought. It was just an inconvenience, this spell in the jailhouse. He knew he’d get out, and he knew he’d never be convicted. His daddy would see to that.

The Grand Jury met the following spring, and on April 10, 1952, they issued the following official statement:  Byrd Richardson, Jr. aka John Byrd Richardson did, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, kill Erk Bailey, aka Eckhart Bailey, by cutting him with a knife, contrary to the law and against the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama and is to answer in court to the charge of Murder in the First Degree.

And, until the trial in the hottest part of the coming summer, in the French Second Empire courthouse, Byrd would keep on doing whatever he pleased.

*As I look again at the 1911 photo of the courthouse, I doubt that it was taken from the front of the building. On the left we can see the fancy facade of buildings that seem to be aligned along main street. The 1930 map shows no buildings on the street to the west of the courthouse, except city hall on the front corner and the fire station on the far corner. The rest of the block was vacant. Of course it’s possible there were buildings there twenty years before the map was drawn, but unlikely. The 1930 map clearly shows the jail building to the east and back of the courthouse, just about where we see the small building on the right of the photograph. My cousin remembers concrete walks from all four sides of the building to the edges of the block, and from the corners of the block to the corners of building. Lots of roller skating. The photo seems to be primarily of the man on the bench, taken from the eastern sidewalk near the corner drugstore. Maybe someone who remembers the courthouse from the front can confirm or deny this. Although it’s no excuse for the Budda stoop, and the front may have been better, I like the 1902 courthouse better than any we’ve had since. We could’ve fixed it.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved

The Right Southern Corner