Hood County Judge Andy Rash was sitting in his office last week surrounded by white moving boxes. He should be moving to his temporary office in another building, but that won’t happen as long as he busies himself signing county documents and visiting with a constant stream of constituents who want his attention.
The reason for Rash’s reluctant departure from his first-floor office in Hood County’s 1890 courthouse is that contractors are preparing to restore the building to its original condition as part of the Texas Historical Commission’s Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program.
In the coming months, workers will begin the $5 million project, which is expected to take more than two years to complete. After a quick tour inside the Victorian courthouse, it’s apparent what kind of work needs to be done: A thick coat of dull white paint covers every inch of the courthouse’s detailed woodwork and plaster; 1980s-era fake bricks cover the original concrete floors; and the second-floor courtroom has been cut into several rooms.
“I’m really not looking forward to moving,” Rash says. “But I’m looking forward to the restoration. I’m hoping to get re-elected so I can move back in.”
Should the voters return Rash to office in 2010, he’ll likely preside over one heck of a grand courtroom. Two years ago, Hood County built a new justice center, and the historic courtroom’s former occupant, the 355th District Court moved in. That left the historic courtroom to Rash, who as the county judge hears a variety of probate, mental health, guardianship and juvenile cases.
Rash, a Hood County native, vaguely remembers a time when the courtroom was one giant room. But nobody knows for sure what it looked like originally, because there are no known photos of the courtroom in the 1890s. At this point, the configuration of the bench and the railing are just a guess, although the original audience benches for the courtroom are still used in the courthouse hallways, he says. Rash says the county is asking anyone who has old photos of the inside of the courthouse to bring them in to help with the restoration.
Still, when the courtroom’s modified walls come down and the false ceilings are removed, the courtroom will be grand in size.
“I think we’re going to have one of the nicer ones,” Rash says of the courtroom. “The people at the historical commission said we have one of the highest courtroom ceilings in the state. It’s 30 feet high.”
Deadly Campaign
The biggest trial that took place inside Hood County’s district courtroom was likely the strange case of E.C. Gaines, a state representative from Comanche who was accused of fatally shooting his challenger, J.W. Reeves, while on the campaign trail in 1908.
A change of venue relocated the trial of the prominent lawmaker from Comanche County to Hood County because of Gaines’ notoriety. More than 100 people testified before a packed courtroom in the 1909 trial, according to an article in The Dallas Morning News that same year. A Hood County jury found Gaines guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to three years in the state penitentiary.
But in 1910, the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed and remanded Gaines’ conviction. The lengthy decision in Gaines v. State seemed to conclude that it was Reeves’ fault that Gaines shot him, because Reeves ran too harsh a campaign against the incumbent.
“It is conceded and undoubtedly true that the deceased in the prosecution of his campaign was guilty of both intemperate language in public speech and the circulation of literature containing the most severe reflections upon appellant,” the opinion stated.
For those reasons, Gaines was justified in arming himself to stop the slander against him, even though Gaines wasn’t necessarily afraid of Reeves, the CCA ruled.
The CCA also reversed the conviction, because the trial judge did not charge the jury with the question of whether Gaines was justified in arming himself as a response to the slander.
Decades later, the same courtroom was the scene of several civil trials that wound up as precedent-making opinions by the Texas Supreme Court.
In the 1970s several Hood County landowners sued the Texas Electrical Service Co. after the company condemned sections of their property during the construction of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant.
Portions of the land were condemned to build a rail line to transport nuclear waste away from the power plant. The plaintiff-landowners alleged that the rail line caused their land value to plummet.
In one trial, a Hood County jury awarded Burlyn H. Nelson $105,000 for the devaluation of 350 acres of his property. Nelson alleged that the drop in his property value was the result of fears of a nuclear accident in the event of a railway crash on his land.
The Texas Supreme Court affirmed the jury awards to Hood County landowners in 1977′s Texas Electric Service Co. v. Ragle, et al., finding expert witness testimony concluding that a nuclear accident was a possibility on the land was valid. In its appeal, the company had argued that a nuclear accident on the land wasn’t a realistic concern.
“The danger is based on fact, rather than fancy, delusion or imagination,” the court ruled in upholding the jury verdicts.
Guns and Snakes
During the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Hattox likely graced the Hood County Courthouse’s district courtroom more often than any other lawyer while serving as Hood County district attorney. Those 16 years as DA have left him with plenty of stories to tell about the courthouse.
“We got a snake one morning in the jury room,” Hattox says.
During his time as DA, lawyers, staff and the county judge all met in the jury room every morning, because that’s where the coffee pot was located, he explains.
“The bailiff at that time was Ray Young who pushed the door open — it took effort, because it was heavy — and there was the snake,” Hattox says. “Of course it caused an uproar. And there were jokes, as you could imagine.”
Hattox believed the reptile was a harmless rat snake. “Several of us wanted professional courtesy and mercy for the snake,” Hattox says. “The bailiff did remove it from the courthouse, and there were no shots fired.”
Luckily, no shots were fired in the late 1990s when a rape defendant, who had just been handed a lengthy sentence, tried to grab a bailiff’s gun.
“And he wisely protected his gun,” Hattox says of the bailiff.
What the defendant didn’t count on was that 355th District Judge Ralph Walton had a gun, too, Hattox says.
“Ralph Walton, who had a pistol on the bench, held a firearm on [the defendant],” Hattox says. “The defendant was 19-year-old male. He would have done some damage if he’d have got a hold of the [bailiff's] gun.”
Walton was on vacation last week and could not be reached for comment.
Hattox, now a criminal-defense and family law solo, still has great reverence for the Hood County Courthouse, a building he literally knows from top to bottom. He once was responsible for hand-winding the 100-year-old Seth Thomas clock in the courthouse’s tower. And years ago when workers were doing repairs underneath the courthouse in a crawl space, Hattox went below, poked around and found something most people never knew about the building.
“Underneath the courthouse we found a coal bin. And you could actually see tracks . . . where a wagon was backed up to deliver coal. And the wagon tracks and the coal are still there,” Hattox says.
“It was the highest kind of honor to get to serve in that building and be a part of it,” Hattox says, “and I hope someday they’ll go under the building, see my footprints and know they’re mine.”
