07/27/2026
Some interesting Dallas history.
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The old "Big Red Courthouse" in Dallas, completed in 1892, was Dallas County's sixth try at keeping a courthouse standing. Mysteriously (wink wink, nudge nudge), the first five burned down. I will let your imaginations work collectively on the reasons as to why a place that holds legal records, court proceedings etc ... might be so prone to fire.
Briefly, the first courthouse, a one-story log building erected in 1846 on land donated by John Neely Bryan, burned to the ground that same year. Its brick replacement was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1862, about which I have written in the past. A third courthouse succumbed to flames in the early 1880s, and the building that replaced it managed to survive only about a year before it, too, caught fire. Determined to break the cycle, county leaders commissioned architect James Flanders to design a "fireproof" courthouse. It wasn't. That building burned in 1890 as well. Finally, architect M. A. Orlopp took a different approach, designing the Big Red Courthouse with steel and stone construction modeled after the fire-resistant techniques used in rebuilding Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. That formula finally did the trick: the old Big Red courthouse still stands.
Here's a photo of the big, red courthouse in the early 1900s.
