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Hub artwork - "Marshall Post Office & Federal Courthouse" - Carol Pace

By Michael C. Smith

One of the nice things about the new offices is that we allowed plenty of room for artwork by Marshall's burgeoning artist community.  While that usually means displaying artwork by local artists on a rotating basis, from time to time we do purchase or commission artwork, and this is an instance of the latter that I thought readers might appreciate.  

As readers may or may not know, Marshall's Sam B. Hall, Jr. Courthouse and Federal Building was originally our post office, built in the 1915 under supervising architect Oscar Wenderoth.  The politics on what happened next are an interesting story in themselves.  In 1962, when an upstart lawyer from Marshall named Sam B. Hall Jr. (no, seriously) ran against long-time incumbent Wright Patman, Patman (who gets no picture in this post because my judge didn't like him) retaliated by awarding Marshall a brand-new post office and relocating the federal courthouse to Marshall, then trounced Hall in the Democratic primary. (Hall eventually won Patman's seat in Congress following Patman's death in 1976, and served until 1985, when he was appointed to a federal judgeship, which culminated in hiring me as his law clerk in 1992.  Or something like that.). 

The abandoned post office on the square was repurposed into a federal courthouse, and in 1964 the Jefferson Division became the Marshall Division.  And for years (and certainly through when I clerked for him) Judge Hall grumbled that the building ought to be named for him because it was only to show that Marshall didn't need a local congressman that Patman put a courthouse in Marshall in the first place - he took it as a personal affront that Patman delivered a new post office and courthouse to Marshall just to make Hall look bad.  The building was eventually renamed for Judge Hall only a few days before his death in 1994, but it was in honor of Judge Hall's service in Congress and as a judge, and not because it was a symbol of his getting his tail kicked in a 1962 congressional race. 

When I was a law clerk for Judge Hall I obtained a copy of the original blueprints for the courthouse when it was first built as a post office, and I have had in the back of my head for years having an artist take those blueprints and do something with them.  Our in-house (almost!) artist Carol Pace, whose family worked at that post office for decades, it turns out, took the blueprints, postcards of the courthouse, some postal memorabilia, and a pastel study for Judge Hall's portrait (which hangs in the foyer of the federal courthouse now) and combined it into a collage which hangs in the entry/conference room to our new office's rent space on the 111 side.

So if you're visiting our offices and the building and portrait in the pictures looks a little familiar - that's why. 

Full post as published by Eastern District of Texas Federal Court Practice on December 01, 2010 (boomark / email).