The Montgomery County Courthouse, built in 1953, was respectable, dare I say nice. Considering most of the courthouses I’d seen on the trip, it was definitely in the upper percentile. I was thrown for a minute because there was another building a block away from it on a corner of two major thoroughfares (if one can call the major streets of a sub-3000 person town “thoroughfares”) that was the spitting image of a courthouse. I learned later that it was previously a church but now it’s something else, possibly a restaurant or even a private residence. I would have thought that maybe the county might have acquired it and used it as a museum or event center considering its courthouse-like nature, but maybe they didn’t have the financing or the interest for the upkeep of something like that. What would I know? My daughter and I were just tourists.
We picked up the cache before we hit the courthouse. It was on the back of a sign at a truck pullout. I thought it was going to be “well guarded,” but the sign pointed to “no.” Invenimus, inscripsimus, reposuimus. And once we were done with both, we headed south, past (I kid the not) Negro Hill, which no doubt once had a much less charitable name, across a river and over a bridge into…
