Rick Townsend, *A Visit to the Rhea County Courthouse a Century after Scopes* (Part I)

I spent a day in May of this year at the Rhea County Courthouse.

If the name doesn’t mean anything to you, let me fill you in just a bit.

A Century Ago

In 1925, the Rhea County Courthouse in Tennessee was the scene of what many still consider to be the most impactful trial of the 20th century.

The trial began with a post-World War I public fight over whether Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution should be taught in public schools. The Butler Act, named after Tennessee senator John Washington Butler, prohibited teaching the evolution of humans from other forms of life. It was quite a narrow prohibition in that it did not prohibit teaching evolution in any other forms. The governor signed the act into law, never expecting that it would have much effect. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Immediately, parties on both sides of what was to become a major legal battle seized on the opportunity to draw attention to their respective causes.

The American Civic Liberties Union was spoiling for a fight on the evolution issue, and when they heard about the Butler Act, they placed an ad in local Tennessee newspapers “looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing [the Butler Act] in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test case can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job… All we need now is a willing client.”

Dayton city leaders saw an opportunity to draw attention to their faltering economy and get a spotlight from free media that might accompany such a trial. Those city leaders wanted to use a biology teacher from the local high school as a defendant to accuse of violating the Butler Act. But that teacher had a family and intended to stay in Dayton long term, and as such he did not want to jeopardize his position. The next likely candidate was a second-year teacher, John Thomas Scopes, who taught mathematics and served as the school’s football coach, on occasion substituting in other classes including biology. Scopes later admitted he did not recall actually teaching material that violated the Butler Act, but he was adventurous and cooperative enough to serve as the defendant in the show trial.

The prosecution team recruited William Jennings Bryan, a three-time national party candidate for the US Presidency (defeated all three times). Regardless, Bryan was nationally prominent and influential for nearly four decades.

The defense didn’t have to call Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most prominent and notorious defense attorney, to Scopes’s aid. Darrow volunteered as soon as Bryan was involved.

Fast Forward to 2025 — Impressions of the Town a Century Later

My visit to the courthouse was a bit surreal. I had been studying the Scopes trial for many years. Like many, my early impressions of the trial came from our high school drama club’s presentation of “Inherit the Wind” during my sophomore year. The parody that play provided had a lasting impact. But it was indeed a parody. The real trial took place in a real courtroom with lots of drama to be sure, but it was much different from the play’s dramatic action. The striking differences between that stage and the actual courtroom became clear to me only after several decades and a fair amount of research.

The courthouse sits in a city block and is surrounded by stately trees. The town of Dayton, Tennessee is the seat of Rhea County, where the courthouse forms the town center. It has a mix of turn-of-the-century structures and more recent buildings. Many of the buildings are less than pristine, as would be expected in a town whose origins date back to the early nineteenth century. It was settled around 1820 with the name “Smith’s Crossroads.”

The courthouse is well preserved, and when I visited the courtroom itself, on the second floor, it was getting fresh varnish on the pine flooring, which is original. The bannisters were also being spruced up before the centennial of the trial was to be commemorated two months later in July of this year.

The county archivist, Jacob Smith, is a recent college graduate and was eager to show me the building, discuss its history, and reveal the mountain of work that will keep him (and any interns he can attract and fund) busy for as long as he stays. Over a century of records are kept in storage but need to be archived. Records were placed in storage during the entire time the courthouse has been in use, but they were not catalogued. An archivist position was created in recent years to address that problem. A century’s worth of records has already dislodged a few gems to Jacob’s credit. A notation recording Bryan’s death in Dayton just five days after the trial’s conclusion is one of them.

Driving around the town, one gets the impression that its residents want the city to be a historic treasure, but they haven’t quite been able to make it so. A mix of houses of varying vintages crowd residential streets. Robinson’s Drug Store, the iconic soda counter and local hangout where the town’s leaders concocted the trial’s staging in Dayton, is long gone. The house where William Jennings Bryan and his family stayed, and where he died, still stands but has been so extensively remodeled that it is not recognizable from the vintage 1925 photos. Those renovations began in 1943, less than twenty years after the big events of 1925. Little thought seems to have gone into the historic significance of the house. A historic marker alerts visitors to the site’s importance. That small sign is affixed next to the original concrete retaining wall, with the wall being the only recognizable feature of the property.

The courthouse itself has a nice museum on the basement level. It houses displays that do a good job of getting the main points of the Scopes trial.

A subsequent blog post will describe my July visit to Dayton for the commemorative events and the history symposium city leaders arranged.