The Fort Pierce courthouse was the building the new county waited more than four years for. St. Lucie County was created in 1905 with Fort Pierce as its seat and no courthouse at all, and in its first years the courts sat in a rented club hall, a story told in our history of historic downtown Fort Pierce. This page is the building itself: the resolution that decided it, the tax that paid for it, the marble cornerstone and what went inside, the clock the town raised money for, and the first day of court.
The resolution of April 1909
On Monday, April 5, 1909, after a month of public notice that the question would come up, the Board of County Commissioners resolved that a new courthouse was necessary and should be built at the county seat, the city of Fort Pierce. The board gave its reasons in the resolution itself: to keep the county’s records safe, to speed the public’s business, and to give the state and county governments a proper place to do their work.
It also said how the building would be paid for. Under a 1907 act of the Florida Legislature, the board levied a county courthouse building tax of four mills a year on all taxable property in the county for five years running, 1909 through 1913, in place of every other county building tax. The money went into a separate Building Fund, and the county treasurer was to use it first to pay off the warrants for the courthouse debt.
The same day, the board accepted the plans and specifications presented by a firm of architects from Louisville, Kentucky, subject to any changes the board might make. The resolution was signed by the chairman, Paul Kroegel of Sebastian, and attested by the clerk, J. E. Fultz.
A motion to spend less
In May 1909 one commissioner moved that the board reconsider the plans with a view to lessening the cost of the building. The motion failed four to one. Only its maker voted for it; even the commissioner who seconded it voted no, along with the chairman.
Ground broken in June
Work began in the first week of June 1909 on what was reported as a $33,000 building. The general superintendent had men grading the site, an office and plaster sheds went up, and thirty-five to forty men were expected on the job within days. The contractors expected to finish in eight months.
The cornerstone, September 22, 1909
On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 22, 1909, the cornerstone was laid with Masonic ceremonies. Pupils from the Fort Pierce high school and as many townspeople came to the site, and the marble stone was set according to the old usages of the Masonic fraternity.
The county’s prosecuting attorney gave the address. He asked that no act ever bring discredit on the hall of justice now rising on that stone, and he charged the citizens, as the county’s jurors, to see that no one was unjustly punished and that no one who broke the law was allowed to escape.
Sealed inside the cornerstone went a list of the county and city officers, copies of the local newspapers, a contract of the Florida Citrus Exchange, a half dollar and a penny.
A clock for the tower
The courthouse had a tower, and the county commissioners offered the town a $750 clock for it, with $250 of the price to come from the people of Fort Pierce. The Boosters Club took up the offer, and a soliciting committee of the club’s women raised the town’s share. By the middle of September 1909 the $250 was on deposit, subject to the commissioners’ order. When the clock was put in, the papers of 1910 and 1911 do not say.
The first court in the Fort Pierce courthouse
The spring term of the circuit court convened in the new courthouse on Tuesday, February 15, 1910, the first court held in the building. The Board of Trade met there too, a week after the hurricane of October 1910, and again in May 1911, when thirty members took up electric lights, sewers and water works on the road to the bond election of 1911.
By September 1911, when the News listed what the town had to show, it called the building the finest court house on the East Coast.
Sources
This story is drawn from the two Fort Pierce weeklies of the day, The St. Lucie County Tribune and the Fort Pierce News, digitized by the Library of Congress in Chronicling America and in the public domain. The resolution is printed in full in the Tribune of April 9, 1909; the motion to reconsider in the Tribune of May 21; the start of work in the Tribune of June 11; the clock in the Tribune of September 17; the cornerstone in the Tribune of September 24, 1909; the first court in the Tribune of February 18, 1910; and the town’s list in the News of September 8, 1911.