Fire gutted Chatham County, N.C.’s historic courthouse earlier this year. In Santa Barbara, Calif., an earthquake claimed the Greek Revival county courthouse in 1925. A tornado so badly damaged the Hall County, Ga. courthouse in 1936 that it had to be razed.
Photos courtesy of www.courthousehistory.com
Postcards and images from the Rev. Keith Vincent’s online collection include (clockwise from top right) Tripp County (S.D.) Courthouse being moved to a new location, Pima County (Ariz.) Courthouse in Tucson and Santa Barbara County (Calif.) Courthouse after a 1925 earthquake.
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Those buildings are gone, but their memories — and images — live on, thanks to a Maryland pastor’s hobby.
Rev. Keith Vincent collects postcards and images of county courthouses, more than 14,000 of which are displayed on his website, www.courthousehistory.com.
“I’ve never seen anything as extensive as what this guy has,” said Larry Dix, executive director of the Nebraska Association of County Officials. For the second year, the association is using Vincent’s images in a courthouse calendar that it produces and sells. You can also find the images scattered across the Web on county and courts websites nationwide.
Polk County, Fla. Judge Anne Kaylor maintains a site devoted to Florida courthouse postcards, which includes images from Vincent’s collection. A collector herself, she got to know the pastor several years ago “via e-mail through eBay,” when they were bidding on the same postcards. They agreed not to get into a bidding war.
“He was kind enough to send me his whole collection, which I then scanned and sent back to him,” she said. “I think it’s a treasure that anybody goes to the trouble to save these things, and then to present them online so that other people can enjoy them.”
Postcards became popular at the turn of the 20th century, according to collectorsweekly.com, and are still collected by aficionados of photography, advertising and local history, among others. Vincent’s collection is primarily of professional postcards but includes some amateur cards.
The pastor’s passion for postcards began innocently enough, almost 30 years ago when he was in his mid-20s. “I used to go to postcard shows; and I just like architecture,” he recalled. “And I realized that I couldn’t buy every building I liked postcard-wise. I don’t even know how it started, but I thought about courthouses, and it was a measurable goal, and I like measurable goals.”
Starting out, he got a list of counties from the World Almanac, and he was off. “In those days, there were a lot of private postcard dealers across the country where you could write to them and they would send you postcards,” said Vincent, 55, a history buff who once considered becoming a history teacher. He houses his physical postcard collection in old real estate file cabinets at his home in the Frederick County, Md. town of New Market.
Photo by Ryan Nakielny
The Rev. Keith Vincent stands in front of the former county courthouse in Frederick County, Md., which now serves as City Hall for the city of Frederick.
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Today, he’s more likely to find the cards he wants on eBay, where they can fetch $100 to $150 apiece, depending on demand. He estimates that over the years he’s spent “thousands and thousands” of dollars on his hobby, including travel and 45 to 50 books about courthouses.
“I’ve probably spent about four or five thousand (dollars) a year when it comes down to it with just buying cards,” Vincent said, adding that there’s dearth of postcards currently available.
In documenting county and parish courthouses, he has visited almost 2,500 counties and their county seats. “Since a lot of these towns now have built new courthouses, and for the most part, most towns don’t make postcards anymore, I go to the town to take a picture of it,” he explained. He also returns to places previously visited when a new courthouse is built. His schedule as associate pastor at Mt. Airy Baptist Church in Mt. Airy, Md. often allows him to “put two weeks together” and hit the road. The fact that he’s single also helps.
He recently returned from a trip to South Dakota, Nebraska and “bits of” Montana, Wyoming and Iowa, where he “finished up” the Hawkeye State.
That leaves California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona that he has yet to visit — “And of course, there are four counties in Hawaii that I would like to get to,” Vincent said. The 50th state may be more of a challenge, since he has driven to the states he’s visited thus far. As for the 49th state, he has no plans to visit Alaska because he doesn’t consider its boroughs’ courthouses to be county buildings in the same sense as those in the Lower 48 — many of them formerly were federal buildings, he said.
The postcard-collecting pastor put 6,800 miles on a rental car during his recent swing through the Great Plains. In his early collecting days, he would take his parents along as a vacation for them. His surviving parent, his mother, can no longer take the rigors of the road.
High on his list of courthouses to visit is the 1929 Pima County Courthouse in Tuscon, Ariz., a Spanish Colonial Revival structure of pink stucco-covered brick, Moorish arches and a dome covered by ceramic tiles. One of his personal favorite postcards features a 100-year-old image from Tripp County, S.D., showing the courthouse being moved by locomotive from the town of Lamro to Winner.
Many historic courthouse buildings no longer serve a judicial function. Some have been converted to county offices, museums, even restaurants, Vincent said. And browsing through courthousehistory.com, one can witness the evolution of courthouse architecture — from late-19th- and early-20th-century grandeur, to a more utilitarian style in modern buildings.
Today’s courthouses can be sterile and “ugly” places, Vincent said. “In some counties, the courthouse doesn’t symbolize anything.” But in others, it remains a part of “the coming together of the community at the courthouse square, and they’re just gorgeous buildings.” He created his website, in part, to tout their historical value and has about 500 images yet to add.
“A lot of people don’t realize that such a building preceded the one that’s standing now,” he said, hoping that by sharing his images he might “encourage people to keep what they have.”
York County, Neb. didn’t keep what it had, a fact lamented by County Commissioner Kurt Bulgrin. He happened upon Vincent’s website while doing online research a few years ago. He brought it to the attention of Larry Dix, the Nebraska state association executive.
Bulgrin regrets that his home county’s historic 1888 courthouse was torn down and replaced by a nondescript brick box of a building in the 1970s. According to local lore, he said, it created such a stir that voters attempted to recall the entire five-member County Board, succeeding in unseating two commissioners.
“Even though I never personally saw our old courthouse in York, I still kind of get a little upset about the fact that they tore it down — that future generations couldn’t even enjoy that grand old building,” Bulgrin said.
Now they can, albeit virtually, thanks to Keith Vincent’s online collection.