Ellis County Courthouse Historic District

Waxahachie's downtown core, about 25 square blocks around the Ellis County Courthouse square, contains some fifty historic buildings and engineering structures built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They reflect the years when cotton made the town prosperous enough to be called the "Queen City of the Cotton Belt." The centerpiece is the pink granite courthouse, designed by San Antonio architect J. Reilly Gordon and dedicated July 4, 1895, in Richardsonian Romanesque style. Around it stand Victorian storefronts with cast iron fronts and tin cornices, the 1889 Masonic Building, the 1912 Rogers Hotel, the Chateauesque second county jail, and the 1914 Neo-Classical Federal Building. Railroad depots, an 1889 wrought iron bridge, a concrete viaduct and a brick oil mill show the transportation and industry behind the cotton economy. The district was listed because it preserves this range of styles and an early twentieth century small-town character.