Decorating a 33-foot Christmas tree in the courthouse is tough but rewarding

Soon the historical Jasper County Courthouse will be lit up like a Christmas tree in downtown Newton. But there is another tree that also takes a fair amount of work to get ready in time for the holidays. It’s located inside the courthouse rotunda and it is about four to five times as tall as your average Christmas tree.

Every year the maintenance staff at Jasper County construct an enormous tree that fills the rotunda to its limits and serves as a holiday centerpiece. Jasper County Maintenance Director Adam Sparks acknowledges it is certainly a labor of love, but every year he is swiftly reminded of its importance to the community.

Newton News had a chance to speak with Sparks back in October about the holiday decorations at the courthouse:

1. Can you introduce yourself to readers?

Sparks: My name is Adam Sparks, the maintenance director for Jasper County. I do a little bit of everything for the county. What we’re doing now is getting stuff ready for Christmas, but on a daily basis it’s just maintenance and preventative maintenance of all the buildings I take care of for the county. We’ve got about eight buildings now that we’re taking care of, including two garages.

2. Tell me what it is you and your staff do for the courthouse during the holidays.

Sparks: When Christmas season comes, the maintenance task is to take care of the interior part of the building. We set up the Christmas tree, we do all of the decorating inside and a little bit outside on the lampposts and then mainly the electricians, Van Maanen Electric, they come every year and put up the lights on the outside of the building to turn it into a Christmas tree. They do that every year and it’s at no cost to the county or any taxpayers or out of the Christmas Fund itself.

3. How important is it to the community to have these decorations for the holiday season?

Sparks: I’ve been working for the county for 18 years. When I first came to town I worked at Brooker Plumbing & Heating, so I would attend the lighting ceremony just like you and everybody else in the county did. But at that time I really didn’t know what it was exactly or how the community felt about it. Now after being here for 18 years, as we’re setting up the tree every year, seeing people and their reaction — you can just tell the enjoyment and excitement people in this community get about it. Every year they’re excited by this and want to see it come back.

4. Has it always been this way? Has Jasper County always gone all out when decorating for Christmas?

Sparks: I do remember when I first started we used to have a very tall tree at the courthouse. Nothing like we do now. But that tree somewhere along the lines, about three or four years in, it was very dated and it broke. So about four or five years in we had to put in a new tree and it wasn’t a big tree. It was a 10-foot tree. I noticed then we didn’t put back what was there. We kind of downgraded. And when we downgraded, it was not taken well.

5. Oh man. But that’s not the case now!

Sparks: Correct! We’ve definitely been able to upgrade trees now. We have about a 33-foot tree to the top of the star right now. We would like to grow it bigger but it’s just something we can’t do because the base is so big. We’ve almost occupied all the space in the bottom of the rotunda. We still have to leave room for the wheelchairs to get around. There is just enough room now to get around that.

6. You’ve done initiatives in the past to help the courthouse, like improving the clocktower. What does the courthouse mean to you?

Sparks: I’m not from this community so this isn’t a place I grew up or, before I moved here, had much passion for. It was just a place I moved to. But after working at the county, I realized what that building is. That building is 100-plus years old. Everything in that building that is not new is just of that age. It’s able to stay that way because this county has a little bit of money and they invest that. It all comes from the boards sitting in place. At the end of the day, they choose whether to invest money into that place. They’ve done a good job. It’s very well-maintained. It’s a 100-plus-year-old building. If it goes away, there will never be anything like that again.

7. What drives your passion in preserving the county courthouse?

Sparks: I just like seeing it there. Regardless of if it is always in use, I think it is a building that will always be there, even if someday clear down the road it just turns into this place we go and see and see all the things that are left there. For a couple years now we’ve kind of turned the west lobby into some sort of a museum. We took everything we could find throughout the county that had a lot of age to it like old blueprints, old clocks, old safes — things that you’ll never be able to get back. If they’re gone, they’re gone for good. So they’re all in the west lobby now and easy for the community to see. Not only can they see the TV of the clocktower clock in action, but they can turn around and see another clock behind them that we had to take parts off of to make our clock one whole piece again.

8. A lot of work goes into decorating the courthouse. But is it still something you look forward to doing every year?

Sparks: You’re right it is a lot of work. I don’t know that I love getting ready to drag it out (laughs) but once you start to see the public come in and you see the enjoyment from them, that’s when you realize what you’re doing it for. It’s not for yourself. It’s for everyone else that is here.