May, 2022
Yikes. No, I didn’t get arrested, honest. I didn’t do it! Honest! I didn’t even get a parking ticket. Honest! 🙂
But what I did do is go visit the local County Courthouse, just to get a look at the place. I’m a retired Paralegal and have spent a good deal of time in courthouses in the past, so I tend to look up the local courthouse wherever I travel and check it out. This one was great.
You’ll remember that yesterday I got sidetracked by a bunch of ponies and horses, so I never did get to my original destination yesterday. Today I got there … this wonderful, historic Courthouse.
It’s in the small town of Montesano, WA, in Grays Harbor County, WA. I had always assumed that Aberdeen, the largest town in the county, would be the center of county administration. But it isn’t. The second largest town is Hoquiam, but it doesn’t host the county offices either. Montesano is the third largest town, and that’s where Grays Harbor County offices and courts are. Montesano was established as the county seat back in 1854 and it has continued as such ever since.
The Courthouse and administration building (below) was built in 1911. HERE is a link to historic information about this building.
The clock face is eight feet tall! That’s just the diameter of the white circumference around the clock face, and doesn’t include the concrete around it.
Take a look HERE for cool information about the clock.
I was here two years ago, hoping I could get inside to see this building. But COVID had recently hit and no one who wasn’t on official business was allowed inside the building. Today, they let me in. I thought it might be a boring old building, but it was fascinating and beautiful with solid marble staircases, solid brass handrails, and fantastically curved ceiling structures, not to mention very old and historic paintings on the walls. (click on photos to enlarge them)
From the very middle of the building, looking straight up, there was this impressive set of four glass paintings. I had a hard time not falling down the stairs as I turned to photograph each panel.
The detail of the construction was truly amazing. Solid marble (huge sheets of it), solid dark metal that had obviously been hand-worked and burnished, solid wood carved handrails, and solid brass handrails as well.
And then there were the decades old paintings on the walls, some of which have fallen off the wall because of earthquakes and age, and yet they have been restored and then put back on the walls at great expense to the county.
Yes, the “indians” were depicted as being dressed like the more “popular” mid-western plains indians with head-dresses and breech-cloths and peace pipes and such, whereas Pacific Northwest native people didn’t dress that way. And often in these paintings the white guys were standing and the indians were sitting on the ground below the white guys … but that’s not how it really was back then.
The lighting was oil originally. When they updated the lights to electricity, they kept the original oil fixtures, although they disabled the “oil” part of them. In the photo below, you can see the original oil tank and valve at the top of the light fixture. The original fixture is solid brass.
And then there were what seemed to me to be millions of miles of intricate wood moldings, on every floor, every ceiling, every post, every staircase. I wondered about the crafts-people who created all of that wood molding and the time it took them to do that.
But wait … this isn’t wood! Not one inch of it. The walls are wood, or wood panels, but the yellow molding is sandstone, molded sandstone. Back in the mid-1800’s and later, it was less expensive to create this type of molding than to construct detailed wooden molding.
Do I believe that? I don’t know. I can’t find any information online to dispute what I read in the documentation I was handed when I was there. But the information available in the Courthouse definitely said that.
Today, there are a myriad of automated tools used to create such moldings in wood. But back in the 1800’s there was nothing but a chisel and your hands/arms. So maybe pouring sandstone into pre-fab molds really was less time-consuming and less expensive and resulted in the perfect look that exists today in this building.
At the start of this blog post, I mentioned the “opportunity” of getting arrested. And no, I’d done nothing illegal and wasn’t even suspected. But there was an old jail building right next door. It was a three-story building, just like the Courthouse, but the jail building was in significant disrepair. I didn’t feel a deep need to get into that building (I’m innocent, I swear!), but I bet it has stories to tell.
Oh, darn, I forgot to take a photo of the damage from the gunshots near the front door of the Courthouse. There absolutely is a dent in the solid wood panel wall inside the main door of the courthouse, and then another dent in a metal panel nearby, after a prisoner grabbed a police officer’s gun and then shot his way out of the courthouse. No one was hurt, and the prisoner was subsequently detained. But the marks on the wall are still there.
I didn’t do it, honest! I’m innocent!