Ellis County Courthouse Square & the Faces in the Stone

Drive into Waxahachie from any direction and the courthouse finds you first — a nine-story tower of red sandstone and pink-and-gray granite rising over the square like a Romanesque castle dropped into the Texas prairie. James Riely Gordon designed it in the 1890s, set its four main doors to face true north, south, east, and west, and let European-trained stonemasons cover it in carved faces, leaves, and creatures. Those faces gave the building its most famous story: the legend of a smitten stonemason whose carvings of a local beauty supposedly soured from angelic to demonic as her affection failed to materialize. Around this courthouse spreads one of the best-preserved square in Texas — an old castellated jail, a soldier's monument, Victorian commercial blocks, and a county museum in a former Masonic hall. This short loop circles the square, reads the faces in the stone, and tells you which parts of the tale to take with a grain of salt.