Read time: 6 min.

What constitutes a building? When I was twelve, my dad gave me a booklet of graph paper and told me to go design an addition to his house. As a big fan of architecture, I happily obliged! I didn’t think about whether the changes I suggested would his home into a completely different structure, but that let me to think about Wayne County’s 1811 log courthouse today. It has an extraordinarily convoluted history.

At its essence, the log courthouse in Centerville makes me think of the philosophical trope of the Ship of Theseus. The idea is that a historic ship sailed by a mythological hero is now in a museum’s harbor. Over time, its wood bows out. Planks crack and get replaced. A few centuries later, none of the boat’s original components remain. Is that ship the same as the original? What if every broken piece of lumber was sent to a warehouse somewhere to be reassembled? Is that ship the original, or is it a replacement or something else entirely? Several possible answers exist.

The Ship of Theseus has mystified philosophers for years. Thankfully, we know that Wayne County was organized in 1810. The community of Salisbury was made county seat just a year later¹. A log courthouse was built in 1811 by William Commons and lasted just a year before a brick version was constructed². Despite that, residents of Centerville quickly formed a scheme to relocate the seat of government to their burgeoning community. Back then, being named county seat carried a lot of political and economic weight! The state legislature soon determined that Centerville could claim the title if its residents could build a better courthouse than Salisbury’s.

As the courthouse in Centerville neared completion, state officials came to both towns to compare the structures. Sensing defeat, residents of Salisbury refused to let them go inside their own courthouse, so officials did what you or I’d do when judging a courthouse- they counted the bricks³! The delegates reasoned that whichever courthouse had more bricks must be the better building, and Centerville won. Salisbury dried up and, today, there’s nothing left of the town aside from the old Salisbury Road that once led to it.

Building materials were hard to come by back when Wayne County was pioneer country. By the mid-1820s, most of Salisbury’s businesses had moved to Centerville, and logs from the old courthouse were sent northeast to Richmond, where they were used to build a house on North 5th Street. The house was torn down in 1952, and its logs were rebuilt in Centerville on the grounds of the high school⁴. In some manner, the old courthouse sat in the school yard for forty-six years until it was moved yet again to its current location behind the Mansion House downtown.

The three-story Mansion House, one of downtown Centerville’s most prominent structures, was built in 1840 as an upscale hotel and tavern⁵. Today, it’s a museum, so it only makes sense that the historic Salisbury courthouse sits behind it. The courthouse is what I would describe as a typical, two-story log cabin, four bays wide with a gabled roof perpendicular to the building’s front.

Windows on the bottom floor match the height of the asymmetrical door, while a plaque presented by the local chapter of the Daughters of American Colonists certifies that the building was re-built in Centerville in 1952 as the only remaining log courthouse in the entire northwestern territory. A smaller plaque below indicates the courthouse’s reconstruction behind the Mansion House. The courthouse is open during local festivals or by appointment for tours.

Just like Salisbury, Centerville eventually fell victim to progress and emerging population patterns. By 1873, it was clear to many that Richmond was a better site for the county seat⁶, and citizens began to mobilize around that notion. The county seat moved after a political battle involving literal cannon fire. Centerville’s courthouse is long gone, but its jail remains a few blocks west of the old Salisbury courthouse. Today, the town is essentially a bedroom community for Richmond, but it’s still well-known for its history and the quality of its antique stores. The log courthouse is just visible on the north side of US-40 downtown.

Unfortunately, the old log courthouse now in Centerville has been built, demolished, moved, and rebuilt many times. Whether or not it represents Indiana’s last accurate vision of a pioneer courthouse is fuzzy. In fact, the official 2011 Indiana Landmarks report on our state’s historic courthouses nearly skips over it entirely, dismissively listing it only in a footnote as “[appearing] to be the 1811 Wayne County Courthouse…disassembled and rebuilt several times, most recently at Centerville⁷!”

I wondered if the building I came across behind the Mansion House in Centerville was the original courthouse, a house built from the original courthouse, or a reconstruction of one or the other. No one knows for sure, just like the ship of Theseus. There aren’t any other log courthouse in Indiana to compare it to, but for a completionist like me, the building is another oddball to add to our state’s portfolio.

Sources Cited
1 Fox, Henry Clay. Memoirs of Wayne County and the City of Richmond, Indiana. Madison. Western Historical Association. 1912. Print.
2 Enyart, David. “Wayne County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. May 6, 2019.
3 Nunemaker, Jessica. Little Indiana- Small Town Destinations. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 2016. Print.
4 “Salisbury Log Courthouse” Morrison-Reeves Library History. Morrison-Reeves Library, 2016. Web. Retrieved May 6, 2019.
5 “Mansion House Museum” Visit Richmond. Richmond / Wayne County IN Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2019. Web. Retrieved May 6, 2019.
6 Spahr, Walter E. History of Centerville, Indiana. Richmond. Wayne County Indiana Historical Society. 1966. Print.
7 Indiana’s Historic Courthouses. Indianapolis: Courthouse Preservation Advisory Commission, 2011. Print.