Old McDonald County Courthouse

That two-story building sitting in the center of Pineville's town square is older than it looks, and its stucco exterior is hiding a secret. Underneath that smooth coating are thick walls of soft, handmade local brick, many of them salvaged from an even earlier courthouse that stood on this same ground. The building went up between eighteen sixty-nine and eighteen seventy-one, designed by an architect named Z.P. Cogswell in the American Foursquare style. The stucco came along in nineteen forty-three, and it has been fooling people ever since.

For over a hundred years this courthouse was the seat of justice for McDonald County, a rugged stretch of the Ozarks where the Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma borders converge. The county was named for Alexander McDonald, a sergeant in the Revolutionary War. The courthouse handled everything from land disputes to criminal trials until nineteen seventy-eight, when a new county building opened two blocks to the north.

But the moment that put this building on the cultural map happened in the summer of nineteen thirty-eight, when a Hollywood film crew rolled into Pineville. Twentieth Century Fox was shooting Jesse James, the big-budget Western starring Tyrone Power as Jesse and Henry Fonda as his brother Frank. The production needed a courthouse that looked authentically nineteenth century, and this one fit the bill. The old courthouse played the role of the Liberty, Missouri courthouse in the film, which opened the following year to enormous box office success. The whole county, by all accounts, turned out to watch.

Since then the building was carefully restored between twenty ten and twenty fifteen, and it now operates as a museum run by the McDonald County Historical Society. You can walk through rooms where real frontier justice was dispensed and where, if you know what to look for, the light still falls the way it did on a Hollywood film set.