Historic Alabama Courthouses

With witty commentary and insight, Delos Hughes's book provides a new set of viewing glasses to observe the personality and expressions fused into Alabama’s earliest judicial architecture. The author escorts the reader on a journey stopping in each Alabama county, exploring Alabama's earliest architectural expressions of justice, ranging from log cabins to Neoclassical Revival. Hughes notes that courthouses often reflect through their architecture the ideals of the communities that built them. These elements not only demonstrate the artistic preferences of the county, but also tell stories of its politics, the economy, socioeconomic character, and ethnic backgrounds.

* Southern Literary Review *

Professor Delos Hughes has turned a trove of photographs and historical documentation into a neat, compact, readable book. It is about an important topic — Alabama's historic courthouses — and it offers a multifaceted way of learning about each county's "tastes," and how they stamped aesthetic preferences onto the public space, and, sometimes the fate of these buildings themselves. Hughes, emeritus professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, has since retirement spent time researching and writing about architectural history. His combination of expertise and interest should lure both academics and lay readers for this book, readers who may be interested in economic, social, or political history along with those seduced more by builders, architects, and practitioners. As it happens, these disciplines always are interfaced with individual personalities and money, but also — uniquely to public buildings — with taxpayers' demands. The author captures these realities with facile writing, archival mastery, and precision.

* Alabama Review *

Reading this book is like taking a private tour of Alabama’s historic courthouses with a good friend who is exceptionally adept at architectural history and telling the stories of architects and builders and townspeople alike. The images are exemplary and worth poring over separate from the text, but the interplay of words and pictures is even more informative and entertaining. The explanations of style and local history are witty and pungent, and if you ever wanted to know what that odd doohickey on a turret or staircase is called, Hughes will tell you, without fuss or condescension.

* author of Shot in Alabama: A Photographic History, 1839-1941 *

Historic Alabama Courthouses is a treasure for history buffs, students of architecture, and lovers of beautiful memorable buildings.

* Cullman Sense *

In Historic Alabama Courthouses, Delos Hughes leaves no doubt that he understands and appreciates our architectural heritage. American county courthouses have a universal appeal; they speak for their entire communities. Built to represent all the people, they are sources of civic pride. Hughes wants his readers to feel in our souls that the world did not begin when each of us was born and that we are linked to those who have gone before and who will come after. Historic Alabama Courthouses offers us the gift of a richer, broader, deeper understanding of life, and of life connected to others.

* author of Through Others' Eyes: Published Accounts of Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama *

Delos Hughes’s copiously illustrated Historic Alabama Courthouses: A Century of Their Images and Stories is a significant and much needed visual archive of an important, but neglected, part of early Alabama’s built environment—the county courthouse. Professor Hughes’s short, but witty and insightful, essays accompanying these images provide the reader with architectural information including design sources for each building as well as other interesting facts about these early courthouses. This pioneering study will undoubtedly become a standard reference tool in any well-stocked Alabama library.

From far corners of the state, from private hands and from public collections where some have lain all but forgotten, Delos Hughes has pulled together a remarkable array of vintage Alabama courthouse images. All sixty-seven counties are represented, and often multiple generations of courthouses. Accompanying each entry is a brief but meticulously researched interpretive text. Here we see the rustic as well as the refined, embodying in architecture the public contours of one state's history. What a fitting publication as Alabama prepares to celebrate its bicentennial!

This book is a charmer. The stories say much about the communities where the courthouses were built. If you love local history, you'll really enjoy this one!