Judsonia Weekly Advance,September 6, 1917
OLD POPE COUNTY COURTHOUSE RAZED
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SCENE OF MANY EARLY-DAY EVENTS YIELD PLACE TO NEW SCHOOL BUILDING.
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BUILDING ERECTED IN 1867
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When Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad Was Built Russellville Came In-to Existence and in 1884 County Seat Moved After Bitter Fight.
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Russellville.—
The old Pope County courthouse1 at Dover was wrecked to make room for the new $9,000 brick high school building. Title to the property was perfected by a special act of the Legislature, signed by Governor Brough, and the new building will be completed during the summer. Dover was the first county seat of Pope County,2 and the old courthouse, a two-story brick building, erected in 1867,3, 4 was the first brick building in this part of the state. When the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad, now a part of the Iron Mountain System, was built, Russellville came into existence, and in 18845, 6 the county seat was moved to Russellville, after a bitter contest, in which prejudices and ill feelings were engendered. which have not yet been entirely out-grown. A former county official, in office at the time the removal was voted in a special election, vowed he would never again set foot in Russellville. He has not kept his vow to the letter, but he has not broken it more than a half dozen times in more than 30 years, and then only when the most urgent reasons demanded his presence in the new county seat. For many years Dover was the center of a large judicial district, and many important cases were tried in the old courthouse. After the removal of the county seat the building was used by the public school until its demolition to make room for a more modern and better appointed school building. There was no cornerstone to the old building, but in tearing down the walls workmen found an old calendar for 1871 behind some wood-work, which will be preserved as a relic of the olden days. The calendar was sent out by a St. Louis book and stationery concern and is in a good state of preservation.
- “The Court House at Dover”. The New York Herald. No. 275 Vol XXVII. New York: James Gordon Bennett. September 30, 1872. p. 5. Retrieved 7 March 2023. “In the middle of the village, upon a square, stands the naked brick courthouse… It is fifty feet square, two stories high, and the roof rises from the four sides to the centre. In each side is a door, and from each of these doors the spectator can see four streets of the village, coming into the square at the corners.”
- Dover was not the first county seat. When Pope County was established in 1829, a temporary county seat was established at the home of John Bollinger. A county seat selection committee picked Scotia for the county seat in 1830. When Johnson County was formed 3 years later Scotia was but half a mile from the county line. The county seat was moved to Dwight and, then, in 1834, to Norristown, a growing town of the Arkansas River upstream and across the river from Dardanelle. With the establishment of Yell County on December 5, 1840, the county seat was again on the periphery of the county and the county seat was moved to Dover—a more central location in the county—in 1841, after being selected by commissioners chosen for that purpose.
- The first courthouse was a log structure. On April 8, 1865, much of Dover, including the courthouse, was burned “to keep the federals from occupying it.” (Fortunately, county records had been removed much earlier and hidden in a cave.)
- Winds from a storm on March 8, 1878, damaged the county courthouse in Dover, rendering it “unfit and unsafe”. With the county having no funds to repair the structure, its condition became a consideration for some in the issue of moving the county seat, with citizens of Russellville offering a building site and $2,500 to build a new courthouse there at no cost to the taxpayers. A church was used for a courtroom during terms of the circuit court while the courthouse was unavailable.
- The article has the wrong date for the move of the county seat to Russellville. It wasn’t 1884. The vote that moved it was March 19, 1887, but it was tied up in litigation until June.
- Russellville’s incorporation as a city prompted a debate on moving the county seat, located in Dover since 1841, to one of two growing business centers adjacent to the new tracks. An act to move the county seat passed in the General Assembly in 1873 but was repealed during a special session of the General Assembly in 1874. On March 19, 1887, an election was held on whether to move the county seat to Russellville or to Atkins. Russellville was selected by a margin of 128 votes out of 2,670 total votes cast. The question on moving the county seat had also gone to the voters nearly a decade earlier on September 2, 1878, but the results were overturned in the courts.