Sherwood, Irion’s initial county seat, is so close to Mertzon, the current seat, that it seems more like a suburb than a separate town. The former courthouse was built by William Martin’s company, Martin and Moodie, one of five by the firm (Martin’s several firms produced over twenty Texas county courthouses between 1879 and 1911). It is a simple square building with ground-floor offices in a cross-axial plan and a second-floor courtroom. The walls are of rock-faced, cream-colored limestone with a projecting central bay with arched first-floor doors and segmental-arched second-floor windows. Lateral bays have a single tall window per floor on each side. The hipped roof is covered in standing-seam metal, and limestone chimneys rise on the north and south sides. The exuberant central square tower has triple windows on each side with heavy pediments, a projecting metal cornice, and a mansard dome with circular clock dormers, all topped by a finial.
A few scattered houses remain on the small grid of the town, with the courthouse rising above the mesquite-covered plains and no other buildings around the barren square. After losing its role as county courthouse in 1936 (the railroad had bypassed the town for Mertzon in 1910, leading to Sherwood’s decline), the building was later used by the Sherwood Baptist Church until 1966. Since then the building has been largely unused, although it is officially designated as a community center. The courthouse was built without indoor plumbing and still has none. Perhaps because of its isolation and the surrounding bare landscape, the courthouse is one of the more picturesque in the state.