Denton Courthouse Square & Founding Denton

Stand on the Denton square and almost everything that matters about this town is within a block of you. At the center sits the 1896 courthouse, a limestone-and-marble pile of clock tower, copper finial, and stacked Victorian styles that locals simply call the jewel — the fifth courthouse Denton County built, raised after the third one burned in a fire blamed on a member of the Sam Bass gang. The county itself was carved out of the frontier in 1846 and named, like the town, for John B. Denton, a Methodist circuit rider and lawyer killed in an 1841 Indian fight. Around the square the rest of the story fills in: the hotel where a young Sam Bass mucked stalls before he turned outlaw, the second-floor hardware store where a teachers' college opened with 70 students and grew into the University of North Texas, a 1920s movie palace, a mission-style city hall. This walk is a single loop of the square and a few steps off it — short on distance, long on history.