Lafayette County Courthouse only one in state to share a public square with a cemetery
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The Lafayette County Courthouse, situated in Lewisville, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places for Arkansas as the finest example of Art Deco/WPA Moderne in the county.
Completed in 1942, it was designed by the architectural firm of Clippard & Vaught for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It incorporates not only the Art Deco style of chevrons, lozenges and sunbursts, but also the Moderne government style of architecture with massive, sturdy walls and limited windows. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, art professor Franklin Allen Latimer once observed that it “almost assumes the appearance of a cell block.”
Lewis and Eugenia Steel, who once owned the land the courthouse now occupies, sold it to the Southwestern Improvement Company, the company that developed much of Lewisville. The WPA provided 40 percent of the costs for the new courthouse to replace an older courthouse which dated back to 1890. Of note, the Steel family cemetery, itself dating back to 1860, is still located on the site. This makes it the only courthouse in Arkansas to share a public square with a cemetery.
According to the Lafayette County Historical Society, the first courthouse in the county was a log courthouse built in 1827 on “Chickininny Prairie” near Red River and the old Bodcaw Lumber Company. In 1842 it was replaced with a brick courthouse. When the railroad moved its line, the city, which came to be referred to as “old” Lewisville, moved with it and in 1890 a third courthouse was built in the “new” Lewisville. It was designed by the architectural firm of Frank W. Gibb and built by contractor J. W. Detwiler.
The current courthouse, at 1 Courthouse Square in Lewisville, is a buff-colored brick building with minimal ornamentation, rectangular in its overall design with a stepped design and singleand two-story projections. Characteristic features include aluminum and stainless steel around the door and window trims, horizontal bands of windows, which create a distinctive streamlined look, and horizontal reliefs around the base of the building, over the second story windows, and the flat crenelation at the roof.
The raised relief around the inset step entrances on each side is the only break in the streamlined industrial design, which looked to the modern machine age for its inspiration.