While I was footloose in the Texas Hill Country five years ago this month, I paid another visit to the Old Blanco County Courthouse in Blanco. I’d been there the year before, when Jay and I were in search of the Central Texas Bat Trail. It’s a fine old building, restored in recent decades.
Around back.

Blanco isn’t the county seat of Blanco County and hasn’t been for more than 130 years; Johnson City is. So for decades the old courthouse was one thing and another, and now has an interesting little local museum on the ground floor, and office space as well.

The State of Texas recognizes the structure as historic, and the building wears the distinctive Texas Historical Commission medallion.

I remember seeing those medallions for almost as long as I can remember, especially the one on St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, which I found oddly fascinating as a kid. Who knows, that very one might have planted the seed for my later interest in the sort of markers, plaques, medallions and minor memorials that the world tends to stroll by without a glance.