Hello and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Mary Helen Dodson, author of "The Architecture of Wesley Clark Dodson: Legacy of a Good Name".

Helen, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you so much for having me, Christine.

I'm excited to talk about this book because it is a lot of things.

It's a lot of different kinds of genres, all packed into one book.

But I want to ask you to start by introducing it to us today.

The thing I would say is that it is indeed an architecture book, and it covers the architecture of Wesley Clark Dodson, but it is much more than that.

It is a history of the South before the Civil War, during the Civil War and after reconstruction.

And it's a love story of a man and a woman, who wrote letters back and forth to each other and told us mostly about their time.

So it's really like a biography, but kind of a full look at this man's life.

Like, he'd say, his his childhood, his beginnings, his falling in love, his career.

And he went on to do some great things.

I mean, he he's a man of a, of a very particular time where a lot of things happened in the world and you kind of can see the history just through what he witnessed in his eyes, that that was the idea.

We are fortunate to have, his memoirs that he wrote when he was 85 and the letters that were exchanged between him and his his beloved Sarah at three different stages of their life.

And that paints a picture that lets us see what he thought about what was going on.

Where did your interest is this this if people couldn't tell from the names.

This is, this is your relation.

This is your kin.

Where did your interest in your family history come from.

Oh well there's children.

We were always interested in family history and we were told stories about our family.

So that, when I retired in 2020, my brother and I started doing genealogy, trying to find the roots of our family.

And what happened is, is as we were doing that, we stumbled across, a book by Robert Borden of the Brazos Historical Society that had a chapter on two early settlers in Bryan, and that was Wesley and his wife, Sarah, and that led me into wanting to further research.

Wesley.

What kind of how did that turn into a book?

I mean, there's, there's family research and there's the interest.

But then where did you get that idea to say this should be more.

Well when Covid hit I decided this is the perfect opportunity to write all this down for my children and my grandchildren so that they will know, something of their legacy.

And as I was writing it, I started doing some more research, and it became obvious to me that this, that this man was an important architect and that it was worthy of a much wider audience.

And so at that point, I contacted Texas A&M to see if they would be interested in publishing it.

And this this fits beautifully.

And we, we we've done a lot of wonderful books about architecture and history of Texas.

So it just it's a perfect fit for us.

I'm glad you came to us.

Glad you're able to have this on our list.

When you talk about the research, what kinds of research were you doing?

I mean, in the olden days, we would a picture you in a dusty old archive.

But luckily, now so much of it is online.

I'm sure that helped.

Fortunately, it was during Covid and I could sit there in my office and work.

What research?

I did well, after I connected with the Texas collection, I went through all of his papers, his memoirs, his letters, and then, as I worked on the courthouses, I went to all of the, the, county courthouses where he had built buildings.

And through the county clerk commissioners minutes of the years in which those buildings were being built.

And then I read the newspapers of those periods so that I could fill in the, surroundings of what was going on in the town at the time.

They wanted a new courthouse and some county histories fleshes out even more.

And then I went to discovered the, Portal of Texas history at your former school.

And they had records such as the records of the Texas State Architectural Association, which he helped found.

And they also had the records of the Presbyterian Church there in Waco, where he was an elder, for 20 or 30 years.

So there were a number there number of sources out there to use.

Did you get to travel, did you get to take these photos or did you do that.

Did you visit all the and any of these places.

The only two we had seen before now.

I went to the Hillsboro courthouse when it was rededicated after that disastrous fire in I think it was 1998.

And then when this Fannin County Courthouse was dedicated four years ago, my daughter and I, I went to that one.

So but those were the only two we had seen.

I have to say when I saw them now they're all much more beautiful than they look in the pictures.

It's, I think it's hard to and maybe we've seen 1 or 2, but if you've never been to these courthouses just standing in there, I mean, the scale of them, if it's a bright, sunny day, that color, like, this one's got this beautiful red.

It's just something to be said for standing in front of one of these buildings.

Yeah.

And the odd thing is that when they were built, they were these huge structures just on, almost nothing, with just a few little buildings around.

And even today, those are in small towns with the humble, little bungalows close by, but they just stand out in those counties.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Did you learn anything surprising while you were doing your research, either about about your family or just maybe about Texas or architectural history?

The most surprising thing I found, and this is a little off the topic, but it's in the book, is that Wesley's grandfather, Charles Dodson, fought in the Revolutionary War, and he was in the fourth North Carolina Division, and I just assumed that he had done all his fighting in North and South Carolina against the British.

But found while I was doing the research that he was sent, that his group was sent north to help General Washington at the battles of Brandywine and, Germantown, and that they were up there and then wintered at Valley Forge.

A Valley Forge is about 20 minutes from where I live now.

And I had no idea that my great great great grandfather, wintered it at that point with very delightful to know he was just down the road from you.

I love that.

I also want to talk about, the subtitle legacy of a Good Name.

I know that was important to you, to have as part of the book's title.

What does that phrase mean to you, and why was it important?

He was a very religious man.

And he's, you know, he was a son, grandson and great grandson of, of ministers.

And to him, as he had a verse out of the Bible that basically said, a good name is worth more than the price of rubies.

And he wanted he wanted to do something with his life that when he was gone, he would he would be remembered, for what he had done to to make the world a better place.

Well, I will get to it, but I can say he certainly left his mark on on this world, on our on our state.

Let's so let's talk about let's get into let's talk about his life.

Where did he grow up?

What was his early life like?

Well, he was born in Alabama, but because his father was a methodist circuit writing minister, they transferred them every two years to a new district.

And he grew up on four different farms in Tennessee.

But unfortunately, his father died when he was 13.

And at that point, they left that idyllic life in Tennessee and went down to Alabama to live with one of his older sisters, which was, I think, the custom at the time when a man died.

And he found himself in, the black belt of Alabama with large plantations with 150 slaves.

And it was a great culture shock to him.

He was not fond of the slave slave Ocracy, but looked down on working class people such as his brother in law and himself.

Yes, he.

You describe there was a real culture shock of people who maybe they owned slaves.

They were still working alongside them versus this kind of loafing class who just was far removed from any actual work.

Yeah.

And he said it was difficult because he had to work as an architect against a man who use slaves to do the work.

I am in general, people didn't value his work because slaves could produce it.

So how did he get into architecture to making?

I mean, there, and I want to talk to.

There's a difference between a master builder and an architecture.

Can you talk about some of the terminology, too?

Right before the Civil War.

Architecture was not a profession.

You were either a carpenter and you built your buildings out of pattern books, or you were a master carpenter, and you designed the building and then built it.

Now, after the civil War, by the 1880s.

People were working to make architecture a profession where you would simply design the building, and then the commissioners would hire a separate contractor to build your design, and you would supervise the construction.

So another thing, he was kind of at the forefront of he was at the beginning.

He was a founding member of the Texas State Association of Architects.

And he the first two years he was on the executive committee and they set up the, the, the ethics rules that all architects would have to abide by.

And the standard contract and the standard fees.

And he was trying to professionalize it.

In fact, when he was president of the association, later on, he tried to get, the, the architecture licensed and then a school of architecture so that people could be properly trained before taking the licensing exam.

Which I feel like there was some resistance to that because that was not at the time for his point of view.

It makes sense.

You want professionals, you want that title to mean something.

But this is kind of in the Wild West where you could just throw a shingle up and say, you're a doctor, you're an architect, you're in anything.

But, you can put a building up with some codes.

Sure, sure.

But he wanted somebody who was so principled, he wanted there to be, regulations.

So you could trust that if you had an architect, you were going to get a safe building.

Because in his mind, an architect had to build a building that was safe, for one thing, and that, was functional.

And then third, that was beautiful, that that people could be proud of.

So but we'll backtrack when he was coming up.

There was nothing like that.

It was it was a kind of apprenticeship model.

So how did he get started.

As a builder actually he got very good training.

I don't know why he chose to be a builder other than, one of his brother in law was a carpenter, and he would help him on Saturdays.

And when he was not in school, and he just thought he had a natural bent toward designing, and found an architect in Livingston, Alabama.

No, it was in Gainesville.

Sorry, in Gainesville.

Who would take him on for a four year apprenticeship.

And as he said, he learned everything from that man and then stayed on a fourth year to be sure he had it hit it down before he set off on his own and hung up his shingle.

Now it's around this time that he met his wife.

This is where all of a sudden we get a beautiful love story in this book.

I love that you have these letters that you're able to include them because they are they're both people who love poetry and they are capital are romantics and the romantic movement and the way they write to each other.

I mean, I just was not expecting to turn a page and read that.

It was beautiful.

Yeah, it must have been delightful to find it was.

It was absolutely wonderful.

Yeah.

And I think it shows his personality and her personality.

You kind of feel them more as people and not just.

I'm reading about the history of someone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it was clear that he was madly in love with this woman.

Yeah, absolutely.

We should all be loved like that.

That's.

He set the standard.

I just I thought that was.

That was really a lovely piece to include.

So how did the how did their courtship go?

How did they meet?

How did they how did they come together?

Well, she was a student at the college there in Livingston, and his sister was there, and she introduced him to, to Sarah.

And they had a quick courtship.

But the problem was she graduated and went back to Memphis, Tennessee, to her family.

And so he made 1 or 2 trips over to Memphis and to finally, when they said she wrote and said that they were leaving for Texas and he couldn't bear to have her go that far away.

And so he proposed, she said, I cannot accept your proposal.

There's something there's those words, but come.

And so he went.

And when he got there, I don't know what the problem was, but she accepted the proposal.

They were married and came back to Livingston for a while.

And then this is unfortunately, is the time in their lives when everyone's lives in the South, and perhaps the whole country probably was upended by the start of the Civil War.

Can you talk about his service and and and what he how he served?

Yes.

He went he went into the Alabama, troops.

And after they were trained down in, somewhere near New Orleans, I forgotten where they, they fought in several major battles in, in, in the Civil War.

They were around Vicksburg early on, and then he was injured, but they went back up to the campaign of Chickamauga.

And, then later on, when, General Sherman started the March to the sea, they tried to stop him there and he was wounded again.

So at that point he was sent to, to a hospital to recover.

But, during this period, he was sending letters back to Sarah explaining what was going on at the battles and criticizing the Confederate generals who he felt lost, battles that they should have won, or even if they won the battle, that they should have won more decisively and captured more equipment and drove more men away.

So I thought it was a very interesting peek of one soldier in the Civil War on what was going on and how the South lost.

I, I also enjoyed, I mean his letters are a wealth of information both personally.

And then when he's a witness to history.

They're, they're wonderful additions to really ground this in what was really happening.

And then how did, how did his wife, how did the family fare back on the home front?

Because they had to do it all without him.

Now they had to do it all without him.

She continued to be the assistant to the principal at the university there and taught but it was it was hard.

It was hard.

She talked one time about getting 240 pounds a week to to grind, and I have no idea where that came from, whether they had resorted to a barter economy.

But obviously they missed each other terribly.

And they had they had two little children.

They had a third child who died two weeks after he went into into the army.

And so he'd only held the child once and he died.

I think that was probably common for the for the period, but nonetheless difficult.

Impossible to imagine.

Yes.

So after the war ends, it's just it's not a it's not a good time to be an architect.

I don't think, what prompted their.

They're moving to Texas.

Well, as you said, it was not a good time to build to be an architect.

Not only was nobody building anything in the South after the war because they had no money, they were fleeing the south.

The population just, there is nothing here.

The the armies have burned our fields.

They burned our farming implements.

They burned the woods in many cases.

There's nothing to be gained here.

We we have to leave and start over somewhere else.

And so he tried for a while, but, they both decided if if they were going to get a better life, they had to they had to go elsewhere.

So they come to Texas.

We're gonna have to skip over a lot of stuff here.

Unfortunately, we don't have the time, but they come to Texas.

I do have to highlight they came to Bryan for a little while, and this was pre us having the railroad.

And anybody who was born in Bryan, their descriptions of the town were not the most flattering.

So I'm glad we kind of came up in the world.

I would, I would I will leave that for people to read.

I want them to find that that passage I want that we want and I want to make sure we're talking about the courthouses.

Okay.

Because he comes to Texas, he sets up, he kind of travels around different places.

How did he start designing court?

How do you get to design a courthouse?

Well, he had gone, as you say.

He had gone to Galveston because he heard there was work there, and there was.

And he built several stores and, houses.

But, while he was gone, as you know, I won't tell the story so we can get on, but his wife died, and so he came back because he had to retrieve his children, and I don't think he wanted to leave them again.

So he stayed.

He stayed there and and, his sister was there so he he could put his daughter there.

But shortly after his wife died, he remarried again.

And quickly.

The background of that story is, I think, that he saw a woman who had a mother who was a widow and 4 or 5 younger siblings, and they needed help.

And I think that he felt he could be useful in that situation.

So he he came up there that allowed him to keep his children with him.

And he started building houses in Wheelock in Robertson County.

He was also an elder in the Presbyterian Church and was going to the Senate.

And I think he met some of the ministers from Waco, and they probably, said to the Waco church, if you need an architect, I highly recommend Dodson.

So he got a contract to build a church in Waco.

And when he went to Waco to build a church, the commissioners looked at his building, and they wanted a new courthouse.

They had plans for a new courthouse, but they asked Dodson if he would give them different plans.

And he did.

And so that was his first courthouse in Waco in 1876.

And then he just continued answering ads, taking, you know, putting in bids and got to build several more courthouses.

Well, he didn't initially because, for the first five years after that, he was just building homes and stores in Waco until the Texas legislature passed a law that allowed commissioners to float bonds to build courthouses.

And that is what unleashed the golden age of courthouse construction, because now they could finance the building, and several years later, they did one for jails.

So that you can do that in jail construction.

And he has he has a number of couple of.

Yeah.

About six, 611 remaining.

I know I don't remember how many exactly are still standing.

Yeah.

How many of the of the, of the buildings or the courthouses are still there, seven courthouses still standing and two jails and one church.

Did he have, a signature style or was he just kind of going with what the popular design style of the time was?

Well, most builders were building a Second Empire style, and there are two reasons for that.

One, they were there were two buildings back in the east, one in Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia City Hall, and in Washington, the State War Navy building that were built in this new French Empire style.

And that kind of was considered the the best style for, public buildings.

So most of most of his early buildings, most of his buildings are indeed Second French Empire.

He varied it a little bit with his personal style.

Some of it was Italianate, such as the tower on that building there.

And some it was classical with the columns and the pediments.

And he and he liked to vary the type of mansions that he used, either convex or concave, and changed his roof lines, mixing, mansard roofs with, gable roofs.

So there's a, there is still variety.

I, I very much I mean, the pictures are one of the highlights of the book because you I like that you also have historical either photos or postcards of, of the buildings and then where available, more modern photographs.

So you can really kind of see the full picture of, of the buildings lifetimes.

Yes.

I tried very hard to show you what the situation was, why they needed a courthouse and then the building of it.

And then what happened to those buildings.

And I this is where I would encourage people to read the book.

There's lots of interesting local histories and dramas and where is the they want to move the county seat in some places and then or there's murder.

I mean there's all kinds of fascinating local history with it.

All these stories.

Do you have a favorite?

Did he have a favorite?

No, I really don't that each one is special and it's special to the community that it's in.

And I think all of them are beautiful.

Even the one in Denton, which is a different style and done only because that's what the commissioners asked for.

We were there yesterday, and it is a magnificent building.

That's my favorite, just because I sat in its shadow for many years drinking coffee in college.

Oh, I imagine a lot of people they have.

It's going to have a personal memory attached to it.

Which must be so lovely for you to to visit a place I have.

I have a great, great somebody who designed a hotel in Texas.

He was an architect for C.W.

post, and I got to sleep in that hotel one time.

And just being in a building that somebody you related, it's such a wonderful feeling.

I can only imagine being able to visit several how how gratifying that must feel for you.

And they they let me speak in the, in the courtroom.

So that was wonderful to stand right there in his courtroom.

I just love that.

I also, I want to talk a little bit about preservation.

There's, there's been for, for some buildings were, replaceable or there was fire or there's something happened and they couldn't be saved.

So I'm just fell into disrepair because of time.

And the elements.

But there's a large section on the book dedicated to the the efforts to preserve this history.

Why is that important?

Oh, I know, I know, if you don't know where you're come from, you don't know where you're going.

It's important to preserve our history, to know the values of the people who built these buildings, to know the values of the people that, are our forebears.

And if you tear it down, you lose.

You lose, you.

You past.

You can't.

You can't do that.

Beth.

Absolutely.

Well, we're unfortunately running short on time in our final minute.

What would you hope people take away from this book?

Will I go with the legacy of a good name?

I would hope that I knew that he was a good man who tried to build the public buildings that he felt Texas needed if they were going to be a good society.

I think that just sums it up so well.

You've done a wonderful job.

Thank you so much.

Beautifully written.

I mean, it's easy.

It even if you don't know a lot about architecture, which I all I know about architecture is for what I've read for the show.

So it's you it can have or do, but it it's approachable, so you don't have to have a degree in anything to, to read and enjoy these stories.

And this book, the photography, I mean, I just you've done a lovely job.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you for sharing this piece of history for us.

Thank you so much.

It was a labor of love.

Well, it's it doesn't look like a labor at all.

It looks like, it looks like a wonderful read that I would I would recommend anybody who has an interest in, in history or courthouses or, you know, just all kinds of things.

So thank you so much.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come today.

That's all the time we have for today.

Again, the book is The Architecture of Wesley Clark.

That's and that's all the time we've got.

I will see you again soon.