On the Town:
Courthouse

December, nearing Christmas, in Cottonwood on Broadway, and I’d just come up out of the dim courthouse basement, away from the nineteenth-century census books, and I turned to the cupola to see whether the clock was working: no, the four-forty of the last year. Then I noticed the low noon sun casting the shadow of the clock tower as if it were a gnomon right down the brick street, and the surmounting flagpole was a penumbral lance pointing north to the little river as it had for 116 Decembers. On that shortest day of the year, the cupola shadow told the hour if the clock didn’t, and, on that solstice, it also served as a heliotrope. From cellar to cupola (once there was an old bison skull in the attic), the courthouse bespoke time and the continuance of patterns. I had been below, lost in it all, among the faded and measured scripts that recorded deeds and misdeeds, among the whits of a communal past stacked on bending shelves, one of which held trial evidence: a bottle of formaldehyde and in it a man’s bullet-pierced brain.

Years ago, a deputy clerk, Carrie Breese Chandler, slipped a one-page letter to the future under a floorboard in the courthouse hall (her husband, the county treasurer, was himself installing new flooring—without pay). She wrote of the Santa Fe Railroad at last laying track toward Matfield Green, and she said the Falls had electric lights and sewers. She (who had hidden as a child under her mother’s staircase when Indians dropped by the farmhouse) recalled watching antelope on the near hills from the third-floor oval win dow of the courthouse, and she wrote of boys crawling through that port above Broadway to whip around the high and narrow cornices at an alarming pace, and she wondered whether the buffalo wallows would still remain in 1973, the courthouse centennial, a half century away. Workmen discovered her little time capsule in 1950 and added a sheet of their own and put the letters back under the oak floor.

A couple of decades ago, near the winter solstice, a circuit in the electric clock in the cupola shorted and set fire to the tower. People stood all over town and watched the flames in the sky, and a man said, I’d almost rather it was my home, but the volunteers extinguished the blaze in less than an hour. Instead of tearing off the charred cupola—an architectural detail superfluous now that a siren on the jail warns of tornado, fire, and every Wednesday the stroke of noon—the people rebuilt it and replaced the clock.

Under that bell tower, five generations have been probated, adjudicated, arbitrated, had their property evaluated and assessed, been registered and wedded and divorced, have come for band concerts and ice cream socials, to escape tornadoes, to ask in drought and grasshopper years for hominy, sorghum syrup, dried apples; on the front steps, they’ve seen their farms and houses go under the sheriff’s gavel, and inside they’ve been locked up and set free, and a few have come to know themselves better here than in any church: scratched raggedly into the paint above the steel jail door (Dante into the Inferno): PRAY AS YOU ENTER. In the vaults are multitudes of figures and compilations, and some walls and the third-floor window recess are also ledgers inscribed and dated; high and low are books, names, lists, labels, and words even scrawled on the jail water heater: THIS IS A HOT WATER HATTER, and below, an arrow pointing to the gas flame and: THIS IS A CIGARETT’ES LITER. On the metal walls of the dark cells are tallies of days served and figurings of days remaining (the subtractions wrong). Cut into a door a man’s crime: SHOT HIM IN THE ASS 4 TIMES. Other infractions etched into the steel table: HERE FOR AUTO THEFT and 60 DAYS FOR DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY and POSSION OF DRUGS. Also: THE BEGGINNING OF KNOWLEDGE; a hand releasing a bird; a naked and headless woman, her vagina labeled; and, on the table top, a scratched-in trompe l’oeil of an opened book: on the left page, THE STORY OF WONDER HORSE, on the right, PART ONE BEGINS ON PAGE THREE.

Now: I am standing on Broadway at the tip of the looming winter solstice shadow, and I’m looking at how things seem to rise from the old river crossing, up the red bricks in an easy ascent that passes through the courthouse doors and up the hanging, spiral walnut staircase that makes a complete turn with every floor, up the ladder to the bell tower and on to the topping grillwork. The town seems to approach the building as a subject would his sovereign on a dais. Life here tends toward those bright, tooth-hammered walls with bush-hammered quoins, toward the stones quarried only five blocks west, where now the small, worked ledge above Spring Creek (its source once the town water supply) is concealed in the brush, and where stood the kiln to burn limestone for the mortar. The building has been cut from the hill it stands on, and perhaps no other courthouse in America has traveled so short a distance from bedrock to hall of justice.

In 1859, a few blocks away stood the first courthouse, a log cabin that was also the school, and near it the first jail, once a doctor’s office not much bigger than a wagon bed. The cabin disappeared and, it seemed, so did the jail until Whitt Laughridge, the realty agent and president of the historical society, happened across a reference in some old minutes of the county commissioners which led him to a small, empty house: in the right angle of light, he could see cut stone under the stucco; he had found the first jail, maybe the oldest building in town, hidden in plain sight for a century.

Following the Civil War (the enlistment rate here among the highest in the nation), countians held court in a church, but only judgment of another kind seemed fitting there, so veterans, whose notion of civic duty had been honed by the war, conceived, designed (John Haskell, the architect of the state capitol, was once an army quartermaster), and erected something that appears almost too splendid in this unornamented town. What they did with that building, so seemingly lifted from a nineteenth-century Paris avenue, was to make a county out of four boundary lines, to focus a random identity, to embody common ideals in a symmetrical and substantial Second Empire monument of native stone covered by a red, standing-seam mansard roof that pushes a bell tower from the shallow valley to just above the encircling prairie crests. The next generation would say of those Union men, They builded well, and that phrase became the county motto.

On the evening of the courthouse opening, citizens (hopeful it would attract a rail line) came to tour it, to feast from laden tables in the jail and dance under the embossed-tin ceiling of the single courtroom, and for this they paid a dollar and raised a hundred dollars for a county library they shelved in the courtroom. (Carrie Chandler wrote of taking a book up to the deep, oval-window recess on the third floor and curling up next to the high view and reading The Alhambra, Mr. Midshipman Easy, The Corsican Brothers.) A few years after the opening, some of the celebrants returned to that chamber in 1894 on a less felicitous occasion: a Courant pressman got drunk and killed a high school senior, the son of a former Falls mayor, and hid himself in a ravine east of town. Night came on, weather threatened, and the people grew tense. But, before the storm hit, the pressman turned himself in, and the sheriff rang the tower bell to announce the custody and calm the town. The next night twenty-five masked citizens went to the courtroom, forced the release of the prisoner, marched him in silent and military order to the new railroad trestle over the Cottonwood, and hanged him. Carrie Chandler wrote: Excuse was made for the lynching that so many murders had gone unpunished by law. Since then there have been no further bridge parties, but several murderers have been tried, only to walk out the front door of the courthouse. In surrounding counties, some people still say, If you want to kill a man and get away with it, do it in Chase County.

Those who have been remanded out the back door of the second-floor courtroom into the rear wing that is the jail have found escape almost impossible from the two-foot-thick walls of stone (here and there the mortar half chiseled away) locked together by steel pins; the floor and ceiling of the twin cells are two-by-twelve-inch oak slabs turned narrow side up and covered with sheet iron. In the first years of the courthouse, a prisoner did escape by the classic method of working a window bar loose and lowering himself on a twisted blanket, but since then the jail has been so secure that the state closed it in 1975 for not having a good fire escape. One countian said to me, What the hell? That’s what a jail is—a place you don’t escape from.

The sheriff’s family no longer lives in the three rooms below the jail, nor does his wife cook prisoners’ meals, nor do his children play in an empty cell or hold slumber parties in the courtroom. The children no longer ring the cupola bell for fire, tornadoes, the Fourth of July, and New Year’s Eve, but when Sheriff J. V. Gilmore’s daughters lived here, they pulled the four-story rope to the five-hundred-pound bell for nearly two hours on the day the Third Reich surrendered, and that evening, to a lone jail inmate, the town toper, they carried a celebrative beer. Other children remember the prisoner who made up a crossword puzzle using the sheriff’s name and details of the county, and in the twenties a young daughter held an Elmdale Moonshine Party, where she and her friends entertained themselves by pouring twenty-two gallons of confiscated white mule down the courthouse dram. Over the years, the sheriff’s children (one of whom was born in the room beneath the jail) watched prisoners break rock behind the building, saw deputies kill copperheads in the hallways (five in 1878), peeped in on marriages, and in the vault read the signatures of Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant and their amanuenses, and watched clerks record items in tall ledgers, and they, little deputies, went to the attic and scribbled on the walls and rafters and made them too part of the record. At night, all of the sheriffs and wives and children lay in their beds and heard across the iron floor above the sad pacing of jailed men.

Now: it’s a year since I began telling winter hours by the cupola shadow, and it’s easier today because the cedars that filled the front lawn and concealed much of the courthouse have been pulled up. A hubbub over the trees had existed since the early days; this last round took fourteen months, full-page newspaper ads citing Joyce Kilmer and alluding to the devil, and a lawsuit before the issue disappeared with the trees. I’d known that citizens here do not suffer change in silence, yet how is it, I wondered, that people who hate a cedar, that thief of pastures, can fight so long to preserve twenty of them? It seemed they were beginning to think like the Osage, for whom the red cedar is the tree of life. Then I realized: those trees were a part of the courthouse, pieces of the solid and distinctive building holding deed to their lives actually and otherwise, and the cedars, like the building, were proof that things endure, if not forever, then at least long enough to keep the present recognizable. And, as if to point up the link, Howard Schwilling took home one of the cedars to turn into a grandfather clock case for the courthouse.

This respository is not an old pickled and shot brain hidden away, but a living communal memory, a means of entering the past, the core of civic identity, a stack of chambered stone that bonds the people and sometimes binds and bends them to the general will. If outsiders have mocked countians for living in a removed and windy land, no one has ever laughed at that Second Empire building made from the hills it oversees.