For the first time since it was built 53 years ago, the McMinn County Courthouse in Athens, Tennessee, is undergoing an exterior restoration of its most well-worn feature, its historic front steps.
Over the last five decades, the McMinn courthouse’s front steps on the downtown square in Athens have seen more than four dozen winters and millions of feet passing over them – including those of a U.S. president – slowly wearing away the concrete from the aggregate and rebar underneath.
“The courthouse has always been a great source of pride and compliment f0r McMinn County and downtown Athens, and also there’s a safety side as those things crumbled. They can become dangerous. We wanted to make sure we didn’t get to a state where it wasn’t safe,” McMinn County Mayor John Gentry said.
“And they’ve taken a lot of weather, years of salt treatment in the wintertime to keep them from being slick with ice and years of patching them,” Gentry said. “None of the porch is being removed. It’s just the steps.”
The steps have become so worn and damaged that they needed to be completely replaced, Gentry said. He noted the base of the original cast iron and brass handrails on the steps were damaged from salt treatments over the years, too.
The steps will be restored to appear just as they did when the courthouse was new, according to Gentry, an appropriate goal for the county seat and the setting for President Ronald Reagan‘s visit to the Friendly City in 1985, a day still celebrated by locals.
Gentry said the courthouse portico will remain, while the treads of the massive, curved steps leading to the main entrance will be replaced along with new brass railing on the sides and a new rail down the center.
Gentry said the steps with the center rail might not look as good as they did without it, but the added safety is worth the slight aesthetic change for the 53-year-old courthouse square centerpiece. Other exterior work includes new concrete veneers for worn portions of the courthouse’s foundation and rear steps, he said.
The work is funded by local taxpayers, Gentry said. Cleveland, Tennessee-based Ross Construction Inc. is the contractor for the work that carries a price tag of about $238,000, Gentry said.
There’s no debt involved, he said. “We had all that money saved up.”
A memorial stone installed in 2007 and “still in great shape” acknowledging Reagan’s visit will remain where it is so people can stand where the former president’s platform was erected for his visit 35 years ago, Gentry said. A chair Reagan used that day is in the hands of the McMinn County Historical Society, along with a chair used by former President George W. Bush when he visited Athens in June 2019 to speak at an Athens Chamber of Commerce benefit. Bush is the second president to make a stop in Athens.
Sam Moser, of Main Street Studio Architects in Sweetwater, Tennessee, is the architect charged with making the steps look as close as possible to the originals.
Moser said he, Ross and manufacturer Wausau Tile teamed up to duplicate the old stair treads using the original 1965 courthouse blueprints. They discovered the treads were further customized on site so they had to take section cuts of the existing steps to recreate the profile of the tread. Then they went through plans, shop drawings and details to reproduce the color of the mortar veneer.
Originally, the steps were poured as a monolith slab with the basic step shape in it that was covered with prefabricated treads, he said. The new treads will be secured to the slab with vertical reinforcing rods and incorporate a design to allow moisture a way to escape, which helps prevent damage from seasonal temperature changes, Moser said.
The new handrails will be identical to the old ones because the company that made the originals, while it has been bought out since the 1960s, still has the original components of the step, Moser said. Because of updated building codes, a middle rail will be in the center of the steps in line with the double doors, the only addition to the 1965 design.
Other work will include some repairs to the edge of the porch and new veneer on some areas of the north end, or back of the building.
The courthouse is one of several buildings that have served as the hub of McMinn County government for the past two centuries, according to an article written by county historian Joe Guy, published May 10, 2019, in The Daily Post-Athenian. Some temporary courthouses existed in various places in the county before the first 40×40 brick structure was built in 1827 in Athens, a little to the north of the current courthouse.
That courthouse was damaged during the Civil War so another was built in 1875 that had sibling structures in other counties in Tennessee and Georgia that used the same or similar designs, according to the account written by Guy, who is also McMinn County’s current sheriff.
The 1875-era courthouse stood until 1964, when a fire started in the cupola during renovations and claimed the upper story and damaged most of the rest of the building. Government leaders of the day debated whether to rebuild or build new, finally deciding to erect the version that stands today, according to Guy.
Moser said the work should be done by Dec. 8. He said mortar work can’t be done if temperatures drop below freezing, but some time for weather problems was built into the finish date.
Contact Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6569. Follow him on Twitter @BenBenton or at www.facebook.com/benbenton1.