Historic courthouse on display
Bob Butler doesn’t want to work, though he doesn’t mind “puttering,” he said, looking down at one of the miniature buildings that has taken over his retirement.
Butler, a retired shopping center developer who lives in Kilmarnock, said he started this hobby years ago with model airplanes and trains.
The 86-year-old worked his way back in time, recently finishing a scale model of the historic courthouse in Richmond County.
Using his old business cards as bricks, he worked slowed to provide an accurate representation of the courthouse, which was built in Warsaw in 1749 by Landon Carter of Sabine Hall. No drawings of the courthouse from that time are known to exist, and in the following century, T. Buckler Ghequiere was called on to remodel the structure.
Fortunately for historians, Ghequiere made extensive notes and descriptions of the courthouse before altering it forever.
In 1877, The American Architect and Building News published a letter and drawings from Ghequiere detailing the appearance of the courthouse before, as Ghequiere wrote, “their ancient shape and appearance are so changed by the progressive wants of those who now use them as to leave but a vestige remaining.”
Ghequiere’s notes and drawings helped Butler “rebuild” the old courthouse in miniature form.
Butler, who has also built scale models of Christ Church in Irvington, the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum and Rice’s Hotel/Hughlett’s Tavern, said he spends a good deal of his time at home working on these historic, miniature buildings.
“My wife says our house is falling apart because I only work on small doors,” Butler explained over iced tea in his workshop. He said that he can spend up to a year on a building, working at his own pace. “I’ll do it, and I’ll donate it, but you’ve got to give me a year,” he said. “If I want to take a day to make a window, I’ll take a day.”
All this work in miniatures makes you see the world in a different way, Butler explained. Gravel and dust become building materials. Grape-Nuts became soy beans for his recreating of the Kinsale Granary, he said.
The miniature courthouse sports the judges’ benches, the courtroom itself, bushes, miniature citizens and, of course, windows.
Thanks to Butler’s hobby and Ghequiere’s writing, visitors to the Richmond County Museum in Warsaw can now see what the courthouse looked like in its original form.
