Center's historic courthouse has a castle look and a blue-norther story

Center's historic courthouse does not look like a plain office block. Shelby County accepted J. J. E. Gibson's $26,725 courthouse proposal in 1884. Construction finished in 1885, and the county formally accepted the building on February 12, 1886. Gibson was an Irish-born architect, master mason, and brickmaker whose Center kilns supplied early local buildings.

Texas Historical Commission records call the courthouse early Romanesque Revival. Its cruciform plan, frame cupola, brick cornices, window hoods, and twelve small buttresses and turrets give it a medieval, castle-like character.

A blue norther cracked an entire wall during construction. Gibson rebuilt it with $2,700 of his own money and spent years seeking reimbursement. The repair gives the courthouse a harder story than its decorative brickwork suggests.

The site was already tied to a county-seat fight. After the contested 1866 election, R. L. Parker and Sam Weaver secretly carried county records from Shelbyville to Center. A fire in 1882 later destroyed the courthouse and county records, clearing the way for Gibson's building. The square holds the county-seat dispute, the fire, the weather-damaged wall, and an immigrant builder who lived until 1931 and was buried in Tenaha.