Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Old courthouse stories

Nueces County was six years old in 1853 when county commissioners decided to build a courthouse. They had been meeting in each other's homes.
   The job of designing a building was given to Felix von Blucher, a surveyor. The courthouse was built of shellcrete, a cross between adobe and concrete, on three lots on Mesquite Street bought from H. L. Kinney.
   The courthouse took three years to build and cost $4,000. But the plans that called for a jail were left out. The sheriff, with no jail for prisoners, put them up in a boarding house, at his own expense, or let them go.
   The lack of a jail became an issue when Mat Nolan was sheriff and his brother Tom was deputy. On Aug. 4, 1860, a storekeeper got drunk, started a fight, and was arrested by Sheriff Nolan, who took the man to his home to sleep it off. But the drunk returned to the La Retama Saloon, where he knifed the owner, and in a shootout killed Tom Nolan. The drunk was chased down by townspeople and shot to death.
   The Corpus Christi Ranchero wrote that "Nueces County stands in need of one of those institutions known as a jail." A jail bond issue was passed, by five votes, but the Civil War intervened.
   Courthouse deserted
   Meetings on whether Nueces should vote to secede were held in the courthouse. A leading spokesman against secession was the fiery red-whiskered judge, Edmund J. Davis, who would become the most hated governor in Texas history. The county voted 142 to 42 in favor of secession.
   At the onset of war, a ceremony was held on the steps of the courthouse. A Confederate flag, made of silk and sewn by young ladies in town, was presented to the Corpus Christi Light Infantry by Mary Woessner, called the prettiest girl in town. She would later marry the officer who accepted the flag, William Wrather.
   When Union gunboats shelled the city, the courthouse sat deserted. County officials had evacuated to Santa Margarita, a ferry crossing on the Nueces River near today's Calallen.
   After the war, when a the yellow fever epidemic hit in 1867, the courthouse became the only center of local government for the county and the city. A majority of City Council members died of the fever, which led county commissioners to assume control of city affairs. Their first act was to try to improve the terrible condition of city streets. They divided the town into five districts and appointed a road overseer in charge of each district. Able-bodied men were forced to work as "road hands" under the overseers.
   What was called a "jail" but was really an iron-lockup was added to the upper floor of the courthouse. It was needed in those violent days. In May, 1874, four men were killed in a raid on a one-store community called Penascal, on Baffin Bay.
   Two of the men caught by a posse were brought to Corpus Christi for trial. They were convicted of the crime and hanged on Friday, August 7. The gallows were built extending out from the second-floor balcony of the courthouse. These were the first officially sanctioned hangings in Nueces County.
   The county in the 1870s outgrew its first courthouse. A new courthouse was built of concrete blocks, with a wooden front, next to the old structure. It was called the "Hollub Courthouse," named after the engineer who designed it.
   The Hollub Courthouse, finished in 1875, cost $15,000. The old and new courthouses stood side by side on the north end of courthouse block, facing east on Mesquite, with Belden Street to the north. The old courthouse was used as a jury room and offices for county officials.
   In the middle of the Ropes Boom, in 1892, the county built a fancy new jail next to the first courthouse. A scaffold was erected behind the jail for hangings.
   After more than three decades, the Hollub Courthouse was too small for the growing county. In 1913, voters approved a $250,000 bond issue for a new courthouse. County officials traveled the state looking at courthouses before they settled on a design.
   Death cells
   The county's third courthouse was built south of the three older structures, which were torn down.
   The 1914 courthouse, six stories high and built of brick and stone, was meant to create a sense of awe. It became a showpiece of South Texas; people came from all over to look at it. It was an ultra-modern building in every way; the county even switched to typewriters to record official records.
   Two cells with gallows and a trap door for hangings were built in the 1914 courthouse, but they were never used; the state took over the responsibility of carrying out executions.
   Five years after it was built, the most dramatic event in the history of this building occurred when the 1919 storm hit. The courthouse became a refuge for those caught between the safety of the high bluff and the raging storm surge crashing in from the Gulf.
   As the tidal wave flooded downtown Corpus Christi, carrying away houses and stores, people tried to make it to the courthouse for refuge. As wind-driven rain stung their faces, men at the courthouse formed a human chain that stretched across Belden Street, where people were trying to swim to the courthouse for safety. Some 2,500 people rode out the storm on the upper floors of the building.
   Morgue in basement
   After the storm waters subsided, the basement of the courthouse became a morgue.
   Lucy Caldwell, a teacher from Terrell, wrote an account of the storm in a letter to her mother. She visited the courthouse basement where bodies were lined up in rows. ". . . And, oh, the condition they were in. Arms and legs and heads almost severed, all the hair gone, swollen beyond description, and black from oil, hair entangled with seaweed, and bodies so mutilated that identification was impossible."
   If spirits of the dead should hover around scenes of great tragedy, what a horde of restless spirits must wander the vacant corridors of the old courthouse.
   Before the storm, the 1914 courthouse dominated the north end of town. After the storm, it stood virtually alone in a scene of desolation all around it. It was clearly built to last.
   Like the people it sheltered during the city's worst storm in history, this massive old building is a survivor.
  

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