Old Red Courthouse

While walking through downtown Dallas, it would be difficult not to notice this extraordinary red building. Surrounded today by modern office towers and government buildings, the Old Red Courthouse looks almost as though a piece of nineteenth-century Dallas has been left standing in the middle of the modern city.

Completed in 1892, the building was constructed as the Dallas County Courthouse. Designed by architect Max A. Orlopp Jr., it was built primarily of red sandstone with contrasting stone and is an impressive example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. Massive arches, heavy masonry, rounded towers and an elaborate roofline gave the courthouse the substantial appearance expected of an important civic building.

Its construction tells us something about Dallas at the end of the nineteenth century. Only a few decades earlier, Dallas had been a small settlement along the Trinity River. The arrival of the railroads in the 1870s accelerated its growth, and by the 1890s Dallas was becoming a significant commercial city. Building such an elaborate courthouse was both a practical necessity and a statement about the community Dallas believed it was becoming.

The building originally had an even more dramatic silhouette. A tall central clock tower rose above the courthouse, but it was removed in 1919 because of concerns about its structural stability. During a major restoration completed in the early 2000s, the tower was reconstructed, restoring an important element of the courthouse’s original appearance.

For generations, this was where the business of Dallas County took place. Courtrooms, county offices and public records filled the building, and thousands of residents passed through its doors for the ordinary legal and governmental matters that accompanied the growth of the city. The building eventually became inadequate for the needs of the expanding county government, and courthouse functions moved elsewhere. Like many historic government buildings, Old Red then faced the question of whether an aging structure still had a place in a rapidly modernizing downtown. Fortunately, it survived.

After an extensive restoration, Old Red became home to a museum devoted to Dallas County history. More recently, another chapter has begun: the building once again serves a judicial purpose as the home of the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals. Old Red is therefore more than an attractive historic courthouse. It is a survivor from the period when Dallas was transforming itself from a nineteenth-century Texas town into a major American city and more than 130 years later, it continues to be part of the civic life of Dallas.