Rhea County Courthouse | |
Location | 1475 Market Street Dayton, Tennessee |
---|---|
Coordinates | 35°29′41.74″N85°00′45.63″W / 35.4949278°N 85.0126750°W |
Area | 3.7 acres (1.5 ha) |
Built | 1891 |
Architect | W. Chamberlin Dowling & Taylor |
Architectural style | Italian villa Romanesque |
NRHP reference No. | 72001251 |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | November 7, 1972 [1] |
Designated NHL | December 8, 1976 [2] |
The Rhea County Courthouse is a historic county courthouse in the center of Dayton, the county seat of Rhea County, Tennessee. Built in 1891, it is famous as the scene of the Scopes trial of July 1925, in which teacher John T. Scopes faced charges for including Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in his public school lesson. The trial became a clash of titans between lawyers William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, and epitomizes the tension between fundamentalism and modernism in a wide range of aspects of American society. The courthouse, now also housing a museum devoted to the trial, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976. [1]
The Rhea County Courthouse stands prominently in the center of Dayton, on the courthouse square bounded by 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Market Street, and Court Street. It is a three-story brick building with Romanesque and Italianate features. It has a broad hip roof with a low hip-roofed tower at one corner of the main facade, and a taller square tower with an open octagonal belfry above a clock on the other. Some windows are set in round-arch openings. The building interior has many original features, including the main courtroom on the second floor, where the Scopes monkey trial took place. [3]
The building was constructed in 1890-91, after Dayton was named the county seat, replacing Washington. It was designed by W. Chamberlain and Co., architects from Knoxville, Tennessee, and was built by contractors from Chattanooga. [3]
In July 1925, the courthouse was the scene of one of the mostly widely reported trials of the 1920s, the Scopes trial. Essentially cooked up as a publicity stunt by locals after passage of the state's Butler Act banned the teaching of biological evolution in public schools, science teacher John T. Scopes was arrested and charged with violating the act. The state was represented by renowned orator and fundamentalist Christian icon William Jennings Bryan, and Scopes was defended by an ACLU-funded team headed by noted criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Although Scopes was convicted in a highly sensationalized trial, the culture clash between legal principles, as well as fundamentalism and modernism left an enduring mark on American society. The defense called Bryan to the stand to defend fundamentalism, and successfully exposed the underlying ignorance of his views. In subsequent years, many states that had enacted similar laws repealed them. [3]
A $1-million project which restored the second-floor courtroom to the way it looked during the Scopes trial was completed in 1979. The Rhea County Museum, also called the Scopes Trial Museum, is located in the courthouse basement and contains such memorabilia as the microphone used to broadcast the trial, trial records, photographs, and an audiovisual history of the trial. Every July local people re-enact key moments of the trial in the courtroom. [4] In front of the courthouse stands a commemorative plaque erected by the Tennessee Historical Commission:
2B 23
THE SCOPES TRIALHere, from July 10 to 21, 1925, John
Thomas Scopes, a county high school
teacher, was tried for teaching that
a man descended from a lower order
of animals in violation of a lately
passed state law. William Jennings
Bryan assisted the prosecution;
Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield
Hays, and Dudley Field Malone the
defense. Scopes was convicted.
The Rhea County Courthouse was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 1976. [5] It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. [3] [6]
On October 1, 2005, a statue of William Jennings Bryan was dedicated on the courthouse lawn, funded by a donation from nearby Bryan College. The statue was placed to commemorate the school's 75th anniversary.
On July 14, 2017, a statue of Clarence Darrow was unveiled near Bryan's statue, funded by a donation from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. [7]
The Scopes trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.
The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the book of Genesis account of mankind's origin. The law also prevented the teaching of the evolution of man from what it referred to as lower orders of animals in place of the Biblical account. The law was introduced by Tennessee House of Representatives member John Washington Butler, from whom the law got its name. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 (Education) Section 1922, having been signed into law by Tennessee governor Austin Peay.
William Jennings Bryan was an American lawyer, orator and politician. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. He served in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895 and as the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1915. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called "the Great Commoner", and because of his rhetorical power and early fame as the youngest presidential candidate, "the Boy Orator".
Rhea County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 census, its population was 32,870. Its county seat is Dayton. Rhea County comprises the Dayton, TN micropolitan statistical area, which is also included in the Chattanooga-Cleveland-Dalton, TN-GA-AL combined statistical area.
Dayton is a city in and the county seat of Rhea County, Tennessee, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 7,065. The Dayton Urban Cluster, which includes developed areas adjacent to the city and extends south to Graysville.
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer who became famous in the early 20th century for his involvement in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes trial. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform.
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925, with violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee schools. He was tried in a case known as the Scopes Trial, and was found guilty and fined $100.
Arthur Thomas Stewart was a Democratic United States Senator from Tennessee from 1938 to 1949.
John Tate Raulston was an American state judge in Rhea County, Tennessee, who received national publicity for presiding over the 1925 Scopes Trial, a famous creationism–evolution debate.
Bryan College is a private Christian college in Dayton, Tennessee. It was founded in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes trial to establish an institution of higher education that would teach from a Christian worldview.
Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes is a 1958 book about the Scopes Trial by Ray Ginger, first published in hardcover by Beacon Press and later reprinted in paperback by Oxford University Press. Ginger, a New York trade book editor at the time and later, a professor of history at Brandeis, Wayne State University, and the University of Calgary, had written about Eugene Debs and the city of Chicago in the time of John Peter Altgeld before he tackled the Scopes trial. In the conclusion of Six Days or Forever? Ginger wrote that his book had two purposes: First, to get "the facts straight" in order to correct "many mistakes in previous accounts of the episodes," believing that his book "comes much closer than do those accounts to telling what actually occurred." Second, Ginger "tried to view the Scopes trial in the broadest possible context" (242).
The Old Courthouse, Warren County, also known as Warren County Courthouse, stands prominently on a hill in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and was a symbol of Confederate resistance during the Siege of Vicksburg. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968 and a Mississippi Landmark in 1986. The landmarked area comprises the entire Courthouse Square, which includes the courthouse and four attached buildings that were originally cistern houses for catching rainwater to fight fires, but these were later converted into offices.
Sue Kerr Hicks was an American jurist who practiced law and served as a circuit court judge in the state of Tennessee. He is best known for his role as a co-instigator and prosecutor in the 1925 trial of John T. Scopes, a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher accused of teaching the Theory of Evolution in violation of Tennessee state law. Hicks may have also been the inspiration for the Shel Silverstein song "A Boy Named Sue", which was popularized by Johnny Cash in 1969.
Inherit the Wind is a 1960 American film based on the 1955 play of the same name written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. The film was directed by Stanley Kramer. It stars Spencer Tracy as lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March as his friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady. It also features Gene Kelly, Dick York, Harry Morgan, Donna Anderson, Claude Akins, Noah Beery Jr., Florence Eldridge, Jimmy Boyd and Gordon Polk.
Zenos Frudakis, known as Frudakis, is an American sculptor whose diverse body of work includes monuments, memorials, portrait busts and statues of living and historic individuals, military subjects, sports figures and animal sculpture. Over the past four decades he has sculpted monumental works and over 100 figurative sculptures included within public and private collections throughout the United States and internationally. Frudakis currently lives and works near Philadelphia, and is best known for his sculpture Freedom, which shows a series of figures breaking free from a wall and is installed in downtown Philadelphia. Other notable works are at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, the National Academy of Design, and the Lotos Club of New York City, the Imperial War Museum in England, the Utsukushi ga-hara Open Air Museum in Japan, and the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa.
George Washington Rappleyea, an American metallurgical engineer and the manager of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company in Dayton, Tennessee. He held this position in the summer of 1925 when he became the chief architect of the Scopes Trial. During a meeting at Robinson's Drug Store it was Rappleyea who convinced a group of Dayton businessmen to sponsor a test case of the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in the state's schools. Rappleyea is held responsible for convincing John T. Scopes to be the defendant in the famous "Monkey" Trial.
Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial is a 2006 novel written by American author Ronald Kidd. The story is set in summer 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, and is based on the Scopes Trial.
John Randolph Neal Jr. was an American attorney, law professor, politician, and activist, best known for his role as chief counsel during the 1925 Scopes Trial, and as an advocate for the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1920s and 1930s. He also taught law at the University of Denver and the University of Tennessee, and served in the Tennessee state legislature. He was a candidate for governor or senator numerous times between 1912 and 1954.
The following events occurred in July 1925:
The Williamson County Courthouse in Franklin, Tennessee is a historic courthouse. It is a contributing building in the Franklin Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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(help) and Accompanying photos, exterior and interior (32 KB)