I’ve been known to drive slowly through a town, peering up and down streets for rooflines that may catch my eye, or distinctive architectural details visible through a tangle of powerlines and traffic lights. A small brick building with a front gable orientation and a bevy of brackets at the cornice line fairly screamed at me to stop as I made my way through Campton, Kentucky last week. I imagine the solidly built two-room structure had the same effect on potential clients of its first owner, lawyer William Landsaw Hurst.
Side elevation and facade of the William L. Hurst Law Office.
Located diagonally across the street from the Wolfe County Courthouse, this strikingly simple building rests on a cut sandstone foundation. The façade is three bays wide, with a door flanked by two segmentally arched windows with stone sills.
Façade of the building.
Captain William L. Hurst, a Kentucky native and a Union veteran of the Civil War, bought this property in the 1870s, though the property transfer details are vague. Construction of his law office took place between 1875 and 1887, with the latter date being the accepted date of construction.
The Hurst Law office, circa 1993. Photograph by William J. Macintire, from the NRHP files.
In 1870, Hurst was living in William Taylor’s boarding house in Hazel Green, Kentucky – another Wolfe County town, about 10 miles northeast of the county seat of Campton.
On September 18, 1877, at the age of 48, he married Isabella Duff of Breathitt County, Kentucky. The bride was 28 years old. Two years later, Hurst’s household included his wife, their toddler son, Julius Caesar Hurst, and his sister-in-law, who was acting as the family’s housekeeper.
William Hurst and one of his children. Undated photograph at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/50140122/william-landsaw-hurst#view-photo=80345304
At the time of its construction, Hurst’s law office made quite the statement. No other late 19th century brick buildings survive in Campton, and when the small but well-executed masonry building was finished, its neighbors were frame and log buildings.
The very material of the building suggests stability and permanence, and the carefully rendered architectural details, including the brackets, sawtoothed brick, niches, arches and cornice returns, further demonstrate the power, influence, and hefty pocketbook of the building’s owner and occupant. In other words, with Hurst as your lawyer, how could you lose?
Façade and side elevation.
As elaborate as the exterior was, the interior was all business.
Floorplan of the Hurst Law Office. Drawn by William J. Macintire.
The building has just two rooms in a row, each with a fireplace – the first likely to accommodate clients, while Hurst’s desk and paperwork would perhaps have been in the back room. That room retained, in 1993, a grain painted document cupboard and grained wainscoting beneath a chair rail.
Interior of the back room of the Hurst Law office, showing the document cupboard to the right of the fireplace. Photograph by William J. Macintire, 1993. NRHP Files.
As William J. Macintire stated in his National Register of Historic Places nomination for the building, “the Hurst Law Office is one of the most impressive buildings in Campton.”
From December 12, 1907 issue of the Hazel Green Herald.
After using the brick building near the Courthouse as his law office for around 20 years, Hurst rented the building to the city of Campton between 1914 and 1917 for use as offices for the Sheriff and Clerk. Sadly, Hurst had been declared incompetent by his heirs in 1912, unable to manage his own affairs. He died in 1920, and is buried in a family plot at the Lexington Cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky.
I’m not sure what Hurst’s law office is used for now, but I was delighted to find it standing, a physical manifestation of one man’s status in late 19th and early 20th century Kentucky – and a well-built structure that could easily have another 100 years of usefulness.
