The word swept like wildfire through the town.  Housewives deserted their half-finished meals to rush out into the streets.  Merchants stood in the doorways of their stores, watching grimly.  Children, wild with excitement, scurried through the streets.  In an incredibly short time the square was swarming with anxious citizens.

Texas towns, almost without exception, are built around a square.  Stores and other business enterprises are situated on four sides of it, grouped usually around the courthouse.  If the town is not the county seat or if, like Paris, Texas, it has been laid out in elaborate simplicity by a city architect, it may center about some other public building or an ornamental fountain.  Sometimes it is called a plaza but ordinarily it is simply termed "the Square."

Those who grew up on Main Street may not readily conceive the advantage or beauty of this type of town.  Its origin, I think, was purely utilitarian, resembling as it did the structure of the old forts in which pioneers sought refuge from Indian hordes.  Possibly it was suggested by Spanish haciendas which are built about an open court, or patio.  Whatever its purpose, it is the nucleus from which ripples the circle of the town.

June 1889 photo shows the recently completed Fannin County Courthouse

Public fancy usually dictated that one side of the square was better for business than another.  With the whimsy of the fickle populace, it shifted from north to south, from east to west, but never did it leave the bounds of the square.  There were a few stores, of course, not located on the square, but these were only the border merchants or enterprises like beauty shops and theaters whose trade is more or less assured and who want to avoid the higher rents of the more attractive locations.

The courthouse was the center of our square - a large, old-fashioned building with a tall spire housing a clock.  I remember looking at that steeple and wondering when clocks were invented.  The building, I was certain, had been there always.  So the clock must have been an addition.  For years it had timed our lives.  Its deep boom-boom could be heard for miles if the wind was right.  We went to work and to bed by it.  We timed our cooking by it.  We worried if the wind shifted and we failed to hear it.

History and the old building are bound inextricably one with another.  It had been there at the turn of the century.  Sidewalks and streets had been sloughs in which wagons bogged axle-deep and livestock roamed at will.  Stores, with their new ostentatious fronts, had been unpainted, single-story edifices, crowded with merchandise of varied sorts.  There were open saloons with wide swinging doors and sawdust-covered floors.

These were the days when women did not appear on the streets but cowboys in broad-brimmed hats and high-heeled boots did...when drunkenness and profanity thrived...when the old west met and intimidated the new civilization which was pushing into its borders.

The courthouse had been built of sandstone, once rosy-pink as a baby's skin.  Like a baby's skin, it had not weathered the years in its same delicacy.  It was a square, sturdy building, lifting its index finger high into the blue heavens as if to call the Almighty to witness how well it had served as guardian of the town.  It housed all the county offices.  Its four wide doors were open at all times, except when fierce blue northers cloaked the town in ice, and through them swarmed the people of the county.

At the intersection of the halls, two broad staircases ascended to the upper floor, a singlewide one to the third floor, and a narrow, treacherous flight up inside the clock.  As children, it was our delight to go "up in the clock."  It was dark up there, and there were rats to frighten us into hysterics, but still we went.

Spread before us, as we peered through the shutters beneath the face of the clock, was the patchwork quilt of rolling prairies, fields of cotton and corn, patches of native meadow land waving in high grass, black earth plowed in curving rows, all seamed together with strips of trees in varying shades of green.  Clouds of dust were flung up from the roads and whirled along for miles in the hot winds.

The Clock.  It was never called by any other name.  Never the courthouse clock.  Rarely the town clock.  Just - THE CLOCK.  It was the last visible sight of the town to the departing, the first to greet the returning prodigal.  It was the center of our being, the focus of our existence. 

There were cold nights, bitter as only Texas nights can be, when we would lie awake under a heavy weight of blankets, icy to the very marrow of our bones, and physically unable to bear the burden of so much as a single additional quilt.  Somewhere out in the dark the clock would chime.  Its resonant tone would carry through the still night.  Boom!  Boom!  Boom!  In its innate way, it was hurrying the dawn.

There were long hours when we bent above the sick bed, waiting the crisis of an illness.  Lonely, agonizing hours broken only by the sound of The Clock.  Strange how comforting a lifeless object, half a mile away!

Our pleasures, too, were timed by it.  On Saturday, in the square teeming with country people, paying their weekly visit to the county seat, boys and girls strolled the square leisurely or stood on the courthouse lawn debating.

"Have time for a movie?"

Heads would tilt back; eyes would strain toward the clock.

"It's two hours 'fore we have to go back to the wagon yard."

Emerging from the dark theater, they would tarry long enough to adjust their eyes to the brilliant sunlight and consult the clock once more before hurrying to the "wagon yard," conveniently located near the square in a swarm of blacksmith shops and hamburger stands.

It was a mild December day, the last of the year, when the fire started.  For a time no evidence was visible to the crowd packed in the square.  With difficulty and much danger the volunteer fire department, a brave and remarkably efficient group of men, carried the long hose into the building through doors and windows.

The worn stairs, the floors, the scarred woodwork in the offices, the seats and tables and judge's bench in the courtroom made excellent tinder for the greedy flames which rolled like an orange carpet down the stairs or skipped gleefully from room to room.

The on-lookers could only speculate at the fire's intensity from the occasional flare of red in the tall windows or the blood-curdling tales which spread amongst us.

The assistant superintendent of Education, an elderly spinster who was almost totally deaf, had been working in her office, unconscious of danger, when a fireman discovered her.  She had heard neither the crackling flames nor shouts of the men.  Yes, she had smelled the smoke, but she thought nothing of it.  There were so many fires.

"A piece of stone and iron collapsed from the stairs," the report came, "and ripped the shirt off Tom Hunnicutt's back.  Four men couldn't have lifted it off if it had hit him."

A shudder went through the crowd.

Suddenly the old building belched smoke and flame.  Clouds of black smoke rolled skyward, encircling the clock, which, oblivious to danger, was calmly telling the minutes.  Tongues of flame licked eagerly at the green grass and left it black.

"The Sherman Fire Department is coming," someone shouted.

"And Paris, too."

It was an ominous statement.  A few years before our fire department had been called to Paris when block after block of that lovely city had been reduced to smoking ruins.  We could not know it, of course, but within a few months we would go to Sherman when her courthouse was burned by a bloodthirsty mob seeking to lynch a Negro.  Was our town to share this fate?  Would our homes and buildings be sacrificed?  Men and women looked anxiously about them.  

Automobiles were being moved away from the square, out of danger, and to make a place for the new trucks already speeding down to the highways to relieve our boys.  Children, capering in the streets, frantic with excitement, were removed to the comparative safety of the sidewalks.

Audible above the frenzy of the crowd, the throb of its pumps, the cries of the firemen, the roar of the flames, the old clock struck the noon hour.  Twelve times its ponderous note rolled forth.  It was the voice of the old building, calling its farewell, for even as the tones died away, the steeple trembled.

"Look out," a voice called, and a hundred took up the chant.  "It's falling!"  The clock is falling!"

Unsteadily it careened, first to the left and then to the right.  The hands slipped down and folded together again over the figure six.  In rapidly widening arcs the steeple swayed.  Then, with sleight-of-hand rapidity, it was gone.

Hysterically the crowd scattered.  For a few minutes the square was almost deserted.  Gradually they returned as a deafening clanging in the east heralded the arrival of the first fire trucks coming to our assistance.

It was a long fire, increasingly hard to fight.  All that day it burned, through the night and into the next day.  Twenty-four hours later it had burned down enough that it was safe to enter the building in an attempt to salvage part of it.

Life goes on despite crises, and soon workers were returning to their jobs.  After looking toward the building, they would sheepishly reach for their watches.  Crude jokes were made at their expense, jokes that poorly concealed the emptiness we felt.

"That's going to stop a lot of clock watching."

The town's oldest citizen, standing in the doorway of his drugstore, shook his head.  A new era had arrived.  The clock was gone, and with it would soon go all that it had represented.

The younger generation allow their lives to be stolen silently by electric clocks, but the older ones still bemoan the fact that the new clocks do not call the hours - indeed, they cannot even agree upon them.  The town has outgrown the square.  The wagon yard is gone, along with the wagon. 

Still, the square bears mute evidence of Texas history.  And there are some of us who still hear, in the silent hours of the night, the calling of the old clock.