Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina

Mar 26, 2016 Sat0Confederate Statues

Laurie and I like riding our Gold Wing motorcycle. But it is easy to get into a rut and just ride the same roads. So to force ourselves to ride to places we would not normally visit we made a goal to visit and photograph all 100 North Carolina courthouses within 1 year.

As usual, we got a little behind. We started in July 2015 and finished 99 out of 100 by June 2018. The last courthouse was in our home county of Wake and it took us until Feb 2021 to get that final one. But we made it! This blog is about one of those visits.

Many NC courthouses were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The nomination form has some interesting facts about the various courthouse styles over the years.






Courthouse Information


Wikipedia says the following about the courthouse:

Gaston County Courthouse is a historic courthouse building located at Gastonia, Gaston County, North Carolina. It was designed by Milburn & Heister in 1909 and built in 1910. It is a three-story, rectangular, Classical Revival style tan brick building with a rear addition. It features pedimented porticoes supported by Ionic order columns, a heavy modillion and dentil cornice, and three-sided pavilions on the side elevations. The building was renovated in 1954.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It is located in the Downtown Gastonia Historic District.






County Information


The North Carolina History Project lists the following information for this county:

Gaston County, founded in 1846, was named for William Gatson, a Congressman and North Carolina Supreme Court justice. A southwestern county that borders Mecklenburg and South Carolina, Gaston covers approximately 350 square miles. The original commissioners of the county were ordered to establish a county seat within two miles of the Long Creek Baptist Meeting House, and they named the seat Dallas, in honor of Vice President George Dallas. Yet, a popular 1911 vote made Gastonia the county seat. Bessemer City, Cherryville, High Shoals, Lowell, McAdenville, Ranlo, Stanley, Spencer, and Mount Holly are other communities within the boundaries of Gaston County.

The Catawba and Cherokee were the first inhabitants of the present Gaston region. By the mid-1700s, however, the German, Dutch, English, and Scotch-Irish immigrants had moved into the area. The Indian tribes were troubled by the wave of white immigrants, and several skirmishes ensued between the Cherokee and the Europeans. James Kuykendall, along with several other settlers, built a fort at the junction between Catawba and South Fork Rivers, but it was never attacked. By the 1770s most of the Cherokee had left, and the Catawba moved to a Fort Mill, South Carolina, to live on a reservation.

In 1750, Captain Samuel Corbin was one of the first settlers to receive a farming grant. After Corbin had accepted his grant, families began to establish themselves, and soon subsistence farms scattered the landscape. However, these farms were not productive, and corn was the only crop to thrive in Gaston County, along with its whiskey by-product. By 1870, Gaston County had earned its trademark as the "Banner Corn Whiskey County of Carolina."

After decades of self-sufficient farming, the industrialization wave changed Gaston County forever, and textiles became the area's true breadwinner. From 1845 to 1848, three cotton mills were founded: the Mountain Island Mill, the South Fork River and McAdenville Mill, and the Stowesville Mill. However, in 1929 the largest textile labor dispute in North Carolina occurred at the Loray Mill in Gastonia. The violent outburst resulted in only two deaths, but the people of Gastonia were intent on forgetting the strike. Despite the Loray Mill strike, Gaston County enjoyed continued economic textile industry growth, and it remains the top county in cotton consumption and in the number of operating spindles. Also, Gaston County has more cotton mills than any other county in the state, and Firestone's factory in Gastonia is considered by some historians to be the "largest textile plant under one roof in the world."






Our Experience


We goofed up here. My coordinates took us to a building that looked like a historical courthouse but we could not find any monuments, plaques or historical markers. All previous courthouses, even if they have been replaced with a modern building, always had markers and monuments which made it obvious the building was the former courthouse. The building had the typical front columns but had an addition that really looked like a hack job. We just could not believe this building was the historic courthouse.

So we checked Google which led us to another modern boring building a few hundred yards away. It had the typical monuments. However I found out later the previous building was the one we wanted. Anytime there is both a historic courthouse and a new modern one, we want the historic building. So we screwed up on this one.

Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:19:32 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Laurie
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:19:53 AM EDT Altitude: 858 ft Camera: iPhone 5sDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:19:56 AM EDT Altitude: 849 ft Camera: iPhone 5sDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Bobby
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:20:42 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:20:52 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:21:02 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:21:13 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:21:22 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:21:56 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:22:38 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:22:50 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:23:07 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:23:40 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina
Mar 26, 2016 Sat 10:24:14 AM EDT Altitude: 822 ft Camera: X100TDisplay on Google Map
Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia, North Carolina



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Rowan County Courthouse in Salisbury, North Carolina




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