Chapter 8

THE THEFT OF THE COURTHOUSE

With the arrival of the seven o’clock hour, a caravan of thirteen double-team farm wagons shoved off from the town of Bay Minette and marched under cover of darkness toward the Baldwin County seat in Daphne. The men, some two dozen strong and armed with Winchester rifles and pistols, traveled in military-style formation.

E.J. Norris was one of them. Nineteen years old at the time, he had been recruited to help right what the good men of Bay Minette considered a grave injustice. He gripped his pistol nervously as the caravan got closer to Daphne.

To a passerby, the group may have resembled a company of soldiers, but this was no military mission. The men, under the command of James D. Hand, meant to break a legal stalemate over the proper location for the county seat by physically removing the courthouse from Daphne, a waterfront city situated across Mobile Bay from the city of Mobile. Among the men was state senator Daniel Dillon Hall, of the north Baldwin community of Tensaw.

The state legislature already had approved moving the county seat, and construction of a new courthouse had been completed. But a legal challenge brought by a group of Daphne residents was tied up in the courts. Hand set out to make the transfer a fait accompli.

After nearly seven hours, the caravan reached the outskirts of Daphne and set up camp between one and two o’clock in the morning on Friday, October 11, 1901. At daybreak, the men resumed their steady approach, stopping about a mile from the courthouse.

Hand led Company “C” to the jail behind the courthouse and presented Frederick Richardson, a black teenager accused of breaking into a home on Hurricane Bayou the day before, for incarceration. The teenager had been found drunk, sleeping on a pallet next to the daughter of the homeowner. The defendant had appeared in front of J.C. Day, a justice of the peace who, as it happened, also worked for Hand’s lumber company.

When Sheriff George B. Bryant opened the jail cell to receive the prisoner, Hand and five other men rushed inside the cage. Bryant ordered the men to leave, and when they refused, he locked the door. Returning, he opened the door and tried again to clear the men out. Hand stepped outside, but the others stood firm.

Details of the raid vary. According to one version, Bryant again locked the cell door and left for Montrose, a community just to the south of Daphne. In another telling, the raiders distracted the sheriff with bogus reports of a murder in the south part of the county that sent him on a wild goose chase. Decades later, when E.J. Norris was a middle-aged mill foreman for a Mobile shipbuilding company, he told a newspaper reporter that the sheriff was in on the raid from the beginning.

“Sheriff George Bryant had arranged everything so all we had to do was walk into the courthouse and walk out with the records from Daphne and place them in the building,” he said.

Either way, with the sheriff gone, Hand’s men went quickly to work. After moving Richardson to a different part of the jail and securing him, they pulled out hatchets, crowbars, chisels and other tools and began to break down the jail. Meanwhile, Company “D” entered the courthouse and started removing desks, chairs, benches, books and vault doors. In a businesslike manner, the men cleared out everything from the probate judge’s desk to the spittoons.

It took about five hours for the men to complete their work. With all thirteen wagons packed, the caravan took off for the new county courthouse in Bay Minette. Several men stayed behind to continue the dismantling. They ate dinner while they waited for the wagons to return.

The activity attracted a small crowd of Daphne residents, several of whom were upset at the spectacle of their town’s central feature under assault. One resident declared it an invasion. Some shed tears as the wagons slowly made their way out of town.

“You may go, but in less time than a month we will have you bring them back,” one resident said.

The men who remained to cut out jail cells and doors became convinced that an injunction was on its way from Mobile to halt their work. But an injunction was neither granted nor sought.

On Saturday night, after a seven-hour journey, more wagons pulled up to the courthouse to load the remaining items. The thieves packed up the most important papers in a large safe. By one account, probate judge Charles Hall carried the county seal, himself.

On the way back to Bay Minette, an axle on one of the wagons broke near Macedonia Baptist Church during services.

Some of the wagons reached Bay Minette that night. Other men camped for the night and made it back to the new county seat on Sunday, October 13.

Meanwhile, when Bryant returned to the courthouse on Saturday, October 12, he found it stripped and abandoned. He hopped a steamer for Mobile to consult with lawyers, later telling newspaper reporters that he would stop the “Bay Minette people” from molesting the court documents.

But by then, the furniture and paperwork of the courthouse were secure in the new building twenty-five miles north. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, as the old saying goes, Bay Minette had the upper hand for the four years of court wrangling that lay ahead.

Bay Minette greeted news of the courthouse theft with glee.

“Yes, we hoisted our Banner upon Daphne’s soil and left her in sad mourning,” boasted “one of the boys” in the raiding party.

An article in the American Banner, a weekly paper published in Bay Minette, bragged: “Ha! Ha! Ha! We are now living at the county seat.”

The godfather of modern Bay Minette, it might be said, was James D. Hand. And his drive to make the city Baldwin’s county seat was more than hometown civic pride. He had a potential personal fortune riding on it.

Hand had moved from Jemison, Alabama, settling in the D’Olive community just outside Bay Minette. He operated a sawmill and, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, purchased a nine-thousand-acre tract of land. He and J.C. Cameron formed the Hand-Cameron Lumber Company, which eventually became the Hand Lumber Company, close to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

The railroad’s predecessor, the Mobile and Montgomery Railroad, had created Bay Minette’s first subdivision in 1884. Hand had much bigger plans, which included residential districts, parks, a school and a business district surrounding a courthouse square. The key to the whole vision was the courthouse.

But the county could have only one seat of government, and since 1868—after yellow fever had decimated the previous county seat in Blakeley—that had been in Daphne. The official business of the county took place in a two-story brick courthouse constructed in 1886. It was the creation of noted Mobile architect Rudolph Benz, who also designed the Mobile County courthouse that opened three years later and the building that housed the Cotton Exchange and chamber of commerce.

A previous effort to move the county seat had failed a couple years earlier. But Hand was undeterred. He aggressively lobbied the state legislature to relocate the seat; a petition drive collected 1,344 signatures, or 1,115 if challenged names were removed. Even the lesser amount exceeded the 886 names that newspaper publisher Ernest Quincy Norton gathered for a counter petition.

Hand and his allies managed to win the support of Senator Hall and state representative George H. Hoyle of Daphne.

The debate in Montgomery in 1900 alarmed many Daphne residents. At times, emotions ran so hot that residents of Daphne and Bay Minette got into fistfights. J.J. McGill, a supporter of the relocation, and J.W. Creamer, chairman of the committee in favor of keeping the courthouse in Daphne, engaged in spirited debates in the local newspaper over the issue and politics in general.

In a letter to the editor of the Daphne Times published in December 1900, an “anxious voter” raised a host of objections.

“In the first place, how are they going to move it?” the writer asked. “Do you reckon they can dump the gosh blame thing on an ox cart and haul it to Bay Minette, or will Russell Dick be engaged to take it up there one brick at a time?”

The writer also pointed out that state law prohibited the sale of alcohol within six miles of a courthouse. What if someone were selling liquor on the road between Daphne and Bay Minette?

“For myself, I am against the scheme. Our courthouse now occupies a community position. It looms over Daphne like the Washington Monument in a grave yard,” he wrote.

The building was constant companion to the homeless goats, razorbacks and other animals that grazed on the courthouse lawn. “Encouraging them in their wickedness, and as a consistent member of the church and democratic party, I am opposed to all such new fangled ideas,” the writer finished with a flourish.

Hoyle took a particular beating. Some called him a traitor to his hometown, and others hung him in effigy. The Daphne Times, which supported the move, also took heat. The newspaper received threats to burn the printing office, forcing the company to post a night guard.

The bad blood prompted a libel lawsuit in April 1901 by Hoyle against Norton, who published a newspaper called the Standard. The complaint accused the newspaper of depicting Hoyle as engaging in “an illegal unpatriotic and dishonest proposition” by promising to defeat the bill relocating the county seat. Norton, according to the complaint, “tended and tried to produce a breach of the peace.”

The county seat bill passed the legislature in February 1901, and Governor William J. Samford—two weeks before his death—refused to veto it, allowing it to become law. It decreed that the county seat should be relocated to Bay Minette and set up an elaborate procedure to pay for it. The act created a board of commissioners to oversee the relocation and sale of the Daphne courthouse. Hand was among the men tapped to serve on the commission, allowing him to personally oversee the transition that promised to make him rich.

With probate judge Charles Hall presiding, the Commissioners Court—the equivalent of a county commission today—voted the following Monday to donate $2,500 for a new jail and courthouse.

Meanwhile, at its first meeting, the board of commissioners elected Hand as its chairman.

On March 2, 1901, a state law took effect directing the Baldwin County probate judge to serve as trustee for a school being authorized for white children at the location of the Daphne courthouse. The school was to purchase the courthouse for not more than $6,000.

Hand and his wife, Mittie, along with Hand Lumber Company, donated two and a half acres in Bay Minette for the courthouse project. The board accepted the offer. He also contributed $1,600.

At the end of March, the board of commissioners voted to sell the Daphne courthouse. It selected Lockwood and Smith of Montgomery to design the new building. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which desired a county seat on its line between Mobile and the state capital in Montgomery, offered to provide free transportation to the architects, as well as free freight services. The total contribution was valued at $1,600.

Later, the board awarded the $21,000 construction contract to F.M. Dobson for the jail and courthouse. The contractor began work on the site a few days after the May 23 vote.

Gus B. Stapleton, who ran a drinking house called Gus’s Place in Daphne, and several others sued that month to halt the project. Hand and the other defendants responded on July 3, asking the judge to rule that the plaintiffs were not entitled to any relief even if the allegations they made were true.

Thomas H. Smith of the Chancery Court in Mobile, with jurisdiction over Baldwin County, took the request under advisement. Meanwhile, work proceeded in Bay Minette. The F&M Masonic Lodge 498 laid the cornerstone during a Fourth of July celebration. Hand conveyed land north of the railroad on July 8.

Smith would not rule until December 3, 1901, ultimately rejecting the defendants’ request to toss the case. They appealed that ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court. But by then, the courthouse raid already had taken place.

Charles Hall, the probate judge in 1901, traced his family tree to the beginning of the United States. A branch of the family were cousins of George Washington, and one member of the clan served on the general’s staff during the Revolutionary War.

A prior Charles Hall came to Baldwin County in about 1783, when it was still part of West Florida under Spanish rule. He married Mary Byrne in 1803. Five years later, the couple settled on the “Honey Cut” three miles north of the old Hall home and built a mill there in 1812.

He had three sons, including Joseph Hall, who became a state representative. The last son of Charles and Mary Hall, also named Charles, bore a son named Charles in 1854. His son, the fourth to be named Charles Hall, moved to Daphne and served as postmaster from 1888 to 1891. He ran successfully for probate judge and served twelve years.

Upon his death in 1927, the Baldwin Times praised his long years of public service: “No man ever served Baldwin with greater earnestness of purpose, unalloyed sincerity, and fidelity to duty, that always marked his services.”

Two of his grandchildren told the Mobile Register in 2001 that the judge was innocent of the historical accusations. They said that their aunt—Hall’s daughter, who was a young girl in 1901—recalled a group of men coming to the house and demanding the keys to the courthouse. Hall refused and asked the men to take care of the records if they did break into the building.

E.J. Norris, the nineteen-year-old who participated in the raid, offered a benign description of Hall’s participation.

“After we had moved the courthouse, there was nothing more for the judge to do but come down to Bay Minette and hold court,” he said.

Whether or not Hall supported the theft, he at the very least had advance knowledge of it. The last document that the judge recorded in Daphne was a deed conveying property from Charles O. Elstrom and his wife to Andrew Tallberg. Hall did not record other deeds filed in Daphne on October 7 until October 16, after the courthouse had reopened in Bay Minette.

The courthouse raid proved politically costly to the county’s elected officials. Hall and all of the members of the Commissioners Court lost their reelection bids.

The ruling from the Supreme Court on the defendants’ appeal did not come until sixteen months—to the day—after Hand and his men set off for Daphne to retrieve the courthouse furniture and files. Writing for the court on February 10, 1903, Justice John R. Tyson ruled that the law authorizing the county seat transfer did not violate the state constitution.

The statute was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, it unconditionally declared that Bay Minette was the new county seat. On the other hand, it stated that the move would not occur until funds had been raised and a determination made that the construction could be financed without raising the tax rate.

“We do not think it can be gainsaid that it was the general purpose of the Legislature to authorize the building of the courthouse and jail at Bay Minette provided it could be done without increasing the tax rate of the county,” Tyson wrote.

The high court sent the case back to Chancery Court, and the state legislature also passed another law explicitly ratifying all previous actions related to the transfer. It became law on March 4, 1903. But that was far from the end of the case.

Gus Stapleton and the other plaintiffs amended the complaint in an effort to take the Supreme Court decision into account. The new complaint alleged that the board of commissioners failed to comply with the requirement of the statute to certify that the courthouse and jail could be constructed without raising taxes.

The defendants again asked the judge to throw out the suit, and Chancellor Smith again ruled against them. But this time, on July 21, 1904, the Supreme Court affirmed the judge’s decision. It ruled without issuing an opinion, but Justice Tyson published a dissent arguing that the legislature must have known that tax revenues from a single year could not have been sufficient to build a courthouse and jail.

“The logical result from what we have said is that the debt could be distributed for several years so as to be paid out of the revenue of the county during those years without any increase of the then existing tax rate,” he wrote.

The case returned to Chancery Court once again. On August 21, 1905, both sides agreed on the facts, leaving Smith to rule on the law. On August 31, he ruled that the law authorizing the relocation of the county seat never took effect except for the provision qualifying the board of commissioners to appraise the Daphne property and raise money for the new courthouse. He ordered the county treasurer not to make any more payments related to the project.

Circuit judge Samuel B. Browne on September 11 ordered Sheriff James M. Armstrong to hold a full term of court in Daphne. When the sheriff refused, Browne ordered his arrest. When the coroner refused to take the sheriff into custody, the judge asked the governor to send in the state militia.

The defendants appealed Smith’s ruling, and for the third time in four years, the case once again was before the Alabama Supreme Court. A combination of retirements and a law expanding the court from five to seven members shifted the composition to a more favorable posture from the perspective of Hand and his supporters.

This time, the high court overruled Smith on December 19, 1905. It dissolved the injunction and ratified what by now was the status quo. Court sessions and county government business had been held in Bay Minette for more than four years at that point.

“It is shown, from the evidence in the case, that said courthouse commissioners have legally and properly ascertained the facts necessary to make the act effectual, and have properly proceeded in accordance with the powers conferred upon them to have the buildings referred to in said act erected,” Justice Robert Tennent Simpson wrote in the court’s opinion.

For the Daphne boosters, the end of the line had come. They had exhausted all legal remedies, and a nighttime raid of their own to retake the courthouse seemed farfetched.

The “courthouse theft” and its subsequent ratification by the courts had profound and long-lasting effects for both Bay Minette and the man who engineered the transfer. Eight months after the final Supreme Court decision, Hand sold his Bay Minette holdings to Hampton D. Ewing, president of the Bay Minette Land Company. Hand made a tidy profit, and Bay Minette developed much like he originally had envisioned.

Several lawyers picked up from Daphne and moved their offices to Bay Minette to be close to the courthouse. The Daphne Times also moved its printing offices to Bay Minette, changing its name to the Baldwin Times, and publishing its first edition on October 24, 1901.

The courthouse remains in Bay Minette today. The “theft” captured the popular imagination and continues to resonate. An artist’s depiction of the event hangs in the Bay Minette post office. In 2001, Daphne officials included a mock crime report among items buried in a time capsule to commemorate the centennial of Bay Minette’s status as the county seat.

Daphne, meanwhile, survived the blow of losing the county seat. Its proximity to Mobile, combined with a pair of crossings over Mobile Bay constructed later in the century, helped make the city a bedroom community of commuters. Today, it is Baldwin County’s largest city.