CARROLLTON - Flames of today's grumbling partisan politics cast light back to 1875, when the Carrollton courthouse was destroyed by fire.
Local history has it that a disgruntled Republican, Felix Doss, torched the building.
The Republican Party was viewed by the Democratic establishment as a catch-all clan of rabble-rousers and radicals, a vehicle for continuing the chaos of Reconstruction life across the South. Federal troops still occupied Mississippi, as well as other Southern states in the aftermath of civil war.
County elections were being held Tuesday, Nov. 2. A massive torchlit rally, featuring a procession and public speakings involving the all-white Montgomery and Carroll Democratic Clubs the preceding Friday night "foreshadowed" the triumph of the Democrats on election day, the Carrollton Conservative reported Nov. 6.
Townspeople thwarted Doss when the noise of church bells awakened them to catastrophe about 3 a.m. the Saturday prior to the election, the newspaper reported. Fire blazed from the second floor, despite a recent "drenching rain," but a judge's private papers were the only papers burned.
Some of those records are endangered these days, as a lack of space and inadequate temperature controls wreak havoc.
"Radicals" also included blacks, who had assumed public office. Accounts of the 1875 election from a Works Progress Administration history of Carroll County that named Doss indicated that an all-white board of supervisors was elected.
These men were F.M. Hanks, District 1; W.J. Woodell, District 2; W.C. Chatham, District 3; William Cothran, District 4; and J.J. DuBard, District 5. They would arrange for interim courthouse space and for the building of a new courthouse - the current one, which was constructed on the same site as the burned structure . Some of the bricks salvaged from the lost courthouse were used.
Coincidentally, Carroll County had been split into a Northern and Southern district in 1874, meaning a second courthouse was then at Vaiden.
Some sources examining the political situation of the early 1870s report that the establishment of a second courthouse was a consolation prize to people of southern Carroll County, who wanted to secede and establish a separate county. This was during the time big Carroll was sliced off to help form Leflore County and swell Grenada and Montgomery counties as well.
Supervisors contracted with the team of Parker and Larmour to build the new Carrollton courthouse and gave them until January 1877 to finish it. The final payment was made in July 1876.
A master mason, James Clark Harris, was appointed to oversee the project. He built a number of places across the county, including Malmaison at Teoc for Choctaw chieftain and state legislator Greenwood Leflore.
Some accommodation for government was at Hart House, used by the town's Presbyterian congregation as an educational building these days, but $35 per month was ordered paid to W.M. Stansbury for use of the old brick store, the Merrill Building Museum. It is now owned by Carroll Society for the Preservation of Antiquities and is located across from the southwest corner of the courthouse lawn, as interim courthouse.
But what happened to the alleged fire-starter?
That's unclear from looking at circuit court records from the years following the conflagration. Nobody was charged. Apparently, justice was satisfied already.
According to further writings in the WPA history, in descriptive passages attributed to historian Fred Witty, the suspect Doss was discovered running from the burning courthouse, was chased, and broke his leg while trying to jump over a fence, "later dying of the wounds."
Doss was described as the "Republican postmaster."
If Southern politics were a fire-breathing dragon in earlier days, national politics was not a gentle beast, either.
As Carroll Countians watched the building of a third courthouse (the first was where the Browning house, a pretty white structure across the street from the southeast corner of the courthouse lawn, now prevails as the home of Stuffy and Gayle Beard) a presidential election year was firing up.
Democrat Samuel Jones Tilden, was the toast of Southern states, including Mississippi, because he was believed to be a moderate in favor of kicking the feds out of the occupied states. He won the popular election over the GOP's Rutherford B. Hayes 4,285,992 to 4,033,768, according to the "The 1990 Information Please Almanac."
Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate. Democrats controlled the House.
Four states - Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon - controlled 22 contested Electoral College votes. The GOP charged Democrats won majorities in Southern states by intimidating black voters, and in the named states, multiple sets of election returns were submitted.
Congress picked a 15-member bipartisan committee to resolve the dispute over the presidential election. There were eight Republicans and five Democrats on this bipartisan committee, and in the end, an Electoral College vote of 185-184 sent Hayes to the White House.
A Yankee major general during the Civil War, Hayes turned out to be a moderate after all, and during the sole term he sought as U.S. president, withdrew federal troops from the Southern states.
