Dateline: June 8, 2006

Donley courthouse appears on PBS special

HOUSTON – The Texas Foundation for the Arts announced last week that the final episode of its three-part series titled The Golden Age of Texas Courthouses – featuring the 1890 Donley County Courthouse – will premiere on KUHT-TV HoustonPBS Ch. 8 on Thursday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m. and will be rebroadcast on Saturday, July 1 at 7:00 p.m.

Produced by Houston-based Texas Foundation for the Arts in association with Sunset Productions, Vol. 3 of The Golden Age of Texas Courthouses continues its cinematic journey into the history of Texas’ restored Victorian era county courthouses.

Donley County’s Romanesque Revival style courthouse is featured in the new 60-minute piece, which showcases historic courthouses built between the 1850s and 1910s. A camera crew visited from Houston to interview Donley County Judge Jack Hall and Donley County Historical Commission member Jean Stavenhagen, who talked about the history of the building and the recent restoration. Both appear in the finished program.

Scenes include exterior and interior views of the courthouse as well as archive photos. It is the only Panhandle-area courthouse featured in the program.

Other county courthouses featured in the program include Denton, Wise, Parker, Grimes, Caldwell, Fort Bend, Lampasas, Wharton, Fayette and Navarro.

Texas has more historic courthouses than any other state and one of the largest collections of Victorian architecture in the country. A total of 102 Texas courthouses are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, 111 are Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks and 91 are State Archeological Landmarks.

Vol. 3 was underwritten by the Albert & Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation and Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP.

After airing on HoustonPBS, the film will be made available to all PBS stations in Texas. The program is available for purchase at www.houstonpbs.org or by calling HoustonPBS at 1-800-364-8200.