County courthouse architecture in colonial America
Court justice was administered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the territories that would become the United States subsequent to the American Revolution in buildings that comprised colonial, county, and municipal structures.
These structures were designed with varying degrees of size and sophistication based on local needs and budgets and were typically inspired by European precedents which comprised different arrangements of adjudicative, clerical, deliberative, and enforcement oriented spaces and rooms, and featured different architectural motifs and symbolic and functional accoutrements.
The shires and hundreds could be further subdivided into third and fourth level political divisions such as ridings, tithings, hides, wapentakes, and parishes.
These meetings would have been where serious crimes, such as felonies punishable by death, would have been tried, as well as lawsuits for higher amounts of damages, probation of large estates, and other matters of concern to the shire.
[3] Each hundred court would be composed of a panel of eight to fifteen or more magistrates, who were upper class local businesspeople and farmers, with no formal training in the law, who volunteered their time to hear cases once a month.
The shute would have broad powers to perform mild to moderate tortures on criminal defendants, accept and reject confessions and witness statements, offer opinions to the schepenen on a suspect's guilt or innocence, and carry out punishments.
Once the schepenen reached their verdict on a criminal case it was customary for the shute to break a straw in front of the convict, symbolizing that no appeal from the court was possible.
[5] In the areas of colonial North America that were first settled by other European states such as France and Spain, including Florida and Louisiana, local courthouses often combined many of the features of English moot halls and courthouses with elements of traditional Roman architecture, often combining deliberative spaces for magistrates and judges with an executive palace for the local mayor or governor, as well as rooms for other social functions.
[1] The first generation of purpose built county courthouses in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were relatively unornamented log and frame structures, typically one room with a courtroom of perhaps 25 by 40 feet, and perhaps a side building for the clerk's office.
On either side of the bystanders' gallery would have been doors leading to the clerk's offices and magistrates and juror's deliberation rooms in the shorter arms of the T-shaped structure.
The height of the platforms symbolized that whether a magistrate was serving on the panel or as a sheriff or jailer, their social status in the court was considered equal.
Rectilinear courtrooms had flat, rectangle shaped walls, although the magistrates' bench could still be curved, forming negative space behind it in the corners.
A railing typically held a shelf for court documents and separated the elevated platform for the magistrates from a bench at floor level immediately in front of it for the jurors.
The larger colonial county jails might have had a capacity of twenty or thirty inmates divided between a half dozen cells organized around a central yard.
Statues, such as lady justice blindfolded holding the sword and scales, didn't emerge until the end of the colonial period into the nineteenth century.
Wainscoted wooden panels typically only extended up the walls to chair rail height, or behind elevated platforms, to the level of the windows.
Fireplaces didn't typically contain mantels, but the paneling would have extended higher up the wall than it would have in the remainder of the room in order to avoid soot buildup.
The English coat of arms was frequently displayed outside colonial American county courthouses and above the presiding magistrate's bench in the courtroom.
