Year Built: 1977
Architect: Welch and Hampton
The Nolan County Courthouse is located in Sweetwater, Texas.
The present-day Nolan County Courthouse was erected in 1977 in a Moderne style with a polished granite veneer as designed by Welch and Hampton.
Nolan County was created along with 53 other counties in 1876. Historian June Rayfield Welch described its unique beginning in “The Texas Courthouse Revisited.”
The Sweetwater Post Office was established in James Manning’s cabin store at Blue Goose in 1879. (The name commemorated an incident in which an easterner shot, cooked, and consumed a crane after cowboys told him it was a blue goose.) The county was organized in 1881 at Manning’s shack. Judge R.C. Crate wrote, “It was the only building here at the time. That was the courthouse, commissioners’ room, post office and all. Later they built some kind of lumber shack for county purposes.”
From the “Monuments of Justice Nolan County Courthouse”, Texas County Progress Website.
