The Tarrant County Courthouse, part of the Tarrant County

Tarrant County, Texas

Tarrant County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, it had a population of 1,809,034. Its county seat is Fort Worth. Tarrant County is the sixteenth most populous county in the United States and the third most populous in Texas. The county is named in honor...

 government campus in Fort Worth, Texas

Fort Worth, Texas

Fort Worth is the 16th-largest city in the United States of America and the fifth-largest city in the state of Texas. Located in North Central Texas, just southeast of the Texas Panhandle, the city is a cultural gateway into the American West and covers nearly in Tarrant, Parker, Denton, and...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, was designed by the architecture firm of Frederick C. Gunn & Louis Curtiss

Louis Curtiss

Louis Singleton Curtiss, was a Canadian-born American architect. Notable as a pioneer of the curtain wall design, he was once described as "the Frank Lloyd Wright of Kansas City", Missouri. In his career, he designed more than 200 buildings, though not all were realized...

 and built by the Probst Construction Company of Chicago, 1893-1895. This pink Texas granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

 building, in Renaissance Revival

Neo-Renaissance

Renaissance Revival is an all-encompassing designation that covers many 19th century architectural revival styles which were neither Grecian nor Gothic but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range of classicizing Italian modes...

 style, closely resembles the Texas State Capitol

Texas State Capitol

The Texas State Capitol is located in Austin, Texas, and is the fourth building to be the house of Texas government in Austin. It houses the chambers of the Texas Legislature and the office of the governor of Texas. It was designed originally during 1881 by architect Elijah E. Myers, and was...

 with the exception of the clock tower. The cost was $408,840 USD

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

 and citizens considered it such a public extravagance that a new County Commissioners' Court was elected in 1894.

The Tarrant County Courthouse currently houses the Tarrant County clerk's office, probate

Probate

Probate is the legal process of administering the estate of a deceased person by resolving all claims and distributing the deceased person's property under the valid will. A probate court decides the validity of a testator's will...

 and county courts at law, a law library, and the Tarrant County facilities management department.

The Tarrant County Courthouse was seen in Walker, Texas Ranger

Walker, Texas Ranger

Walker, Texas Ranger is an American television action crime drama series created by Leslie Greif and Paul Haggis, and starring Chuck Norris as a member of the Texas Ranger Division. The show aired on CBS in the spring of 1993, with the first season consisting of three pilot episodes. Eight full...

.

External Links

• Tarrant County Courthouse page on fortwortharchitecture.com, with exterior and interior photos