The Freestone County Courthouse in Fairfield, a Classical Revival building of 1919–21, is the county's fourth and cost $125,000. The first, built about 1852, was a small wooden building described as "no better than a pigsty." The second, of 1854–56, cost $8,330, and the third, of 1891–92, cost $22,120. The third and fourth were each preceded by a fight over the county seat itself: in 1891 and again in 1918 the need for a new courthouse led to county-seat elections, and Fairfield defeated Wortham the first time and Teague the second. Both rivals owed their growth to railroads. Wortham was laid out in 1871 when the Houston and Texas Central was planned through it, and Teague boomed after 1906, when the Trinity and Brazos Valley made it its shops and division point. Fairfield never acquired a railroad.
The Trinity and Brazos Valley bypassed Fairfield by ten miles when it built across the county in 1906–07, which deprived the town of a strong economic stimulus without causing it to decline. Fairfield had been chosen as county seat in 1850, when its name was changed from Mound Prairie, and 128 lots on 100 acres donated by David Hall Love were auctioned in 1851–52 for six dollars to $101 each. During Reconstruction Freestone was one of four Texas counties placed under martial law: on 9 October 1871 Governor Edmund J. Davis imposed it after reports of coercion and fraudulent voting in Fairfield in the election of 3–6 October, and lifted it on 10 November. Around the turn of the century the town took a run of blows: meningitis killed thirty-two people in 1890, a tornado struck in 1902, the boll weevil took the cotton in 1903, and fire ravaged the business district in 1911.
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31.7258, -96.1599
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