The Montgomery County Courthouse was built in 1876. Sixty-five years later, an artist commissioned to paint the building noticed that the tower appeared to be leaning. It was wartime, and officials acted in haste by decapitating the courthouse, melting its bell down, and dumping the clockworks by the county highway barn. A local jeweler rescued the clock and put it up at his store downtown1, but the rest was history.
The decapitated courthouse was Montgomery County’s third. The first was a 26×20 foot, two-story log cabin built by Eliakim Ashton that lasted seven years. In 1833, John Hughes built a “coffee mill” courthouse, like the one in Rome, that measured 45×45 feet and cost $3,420. The present courthouse, one of six in the state designed by George Bunting, replaced it in 18765.
Bunting’s design looked naked and barren after it was altered, and no one was more crestfallen by its appearance than Dr. James Kirtley. A prominent doctor who later became a state representative, Kirtley grew up eleven blocks from the courthouse square and went to Wabash College down the street2. Peals from the tower’s bell reminded him when to be at class on campus, and the courthouse became both a visual and auditory landmark as he went from class to class. After he returned from fighting in World War II, Kirtley saw that the clock tower was no more. Its absence stung.
In 1996, the doctor started a fund to restore the building3. By the time he succumbed to leukemia, he’d raised a quarter of a million dollars! Kirtley’s dying wish was to finish his project4, so his longtime friend Sandy Lofland-Brown took the reins. By 2015, the group had raised about $300,000, enough to pay for the restoration! Unfortunately, a structural study showed the old building required steel reinforcements to support the weight of a new tower. Estimates of the overall cost were pushed out to half a million dollars by the time I first visited the courthouse and contributed to the effort.
The courthouse landscape was changing- my brother joked that I’d been taking pictures of them for so long that they were starting to build new ones! He wasn’t that far off: counties were repurposing old department stores and schools for use as government buildings, a modern judicial center got rehabbed in Logansport, and a historic courthouse was connected to a modern annex in Lawrenceburg.
In October 2017, Montgomery County officials finally approved a contract to construct the new tower after twenty-one years of fundraising6. As work to install the steel supports began, Campbellsville Industries began building the tower at their Kentucky facility. Once completed, it was disassembled, packed, and carefully driven up I-65 towards I-74 and Crawfordsville.
I made it back to Crawfordsville when the pieces were sitting in the courthouse parking lot. The new tower consisted of three separate constructs: a 12,000-pound base with Corinthian columns and an arched Krinklglas window, a second 10,000-pound segment with four five-foot clock faces, and a third thousand-pound piece with a finial and flagpole7. Once connected, the tower would rise eighty-six feet above the building8. It did- a day after I saw it in the parking lot.
The replacement tower is pretty close to George Bunting’s design, albeit simplified to harmonize with the courthouse, which went through more changes after the clocktower was lopped off. Campbellsville Industries earned an A+ in my book! So did the county commissioners and clock tower committee who recognized the importance of investing in downtown. Ultimately, the building’s new life as a landmark instead of a pockmark is thanks to Dr. Kirtley’s efforts that began nearly thirty years ago.
Seeing the building decked out proudly in its new hat served as a unique bookend to my project to document all of Indiana’s ninety-two courthouses: twelve years ago, my first trip found me rocketing down State Road 32 to see a replacement tower fabricated by Campbellsville Industries out of steel tubing and a .032″ thick aluminum veneer that restored an 1876 landmark.
That was in Winchester.
The trip to Crawfordsville also saw me speeding down State Road 32, albeit in the opposite direction, to see a building erected in 1876 restored by Campbellsville Industries, thanks to steel tubing and a .032″ thick aluminum veneer. Traveling down the same road with the same person to see another old courthouse receive a new clock tower really brought the scope of my project together for me.
The whole thing -my own experiences, plus the story of the Montgomery County Courthouse- made me remember why I started going to all of them in the first place. I was too late to contribute to Randolph County’s restoration in 2011, but my name’s on a plaque inside the restored building in Crawford County, along with everyone else who donated. That’s pretty cool!
It’s often said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The restored Randolph and Montgomery county courthouses, along with my own experiences documenting them and the rest of the state’s portfolio, make that clear. Wrapping up the photo portion of this project felt like losing a friend, but I don’t think I’ll ever be totally done with tracking down courthouses. I still haven’t made it to all of them in Ohio and Michigan!
TL;DR
Montgomery County (pop. 38,177, 40/92)
Crawfordsville (pop. 15,995).
59/92 photographed
Built: 1876. Decapitated in 1941. Restored in 2018.
Cost: $150,000 ($3.27 million in 2016)
Architect: George W. Bunting
Style: Neoclassical
Courthouse Square: No square
Height: 3 stories
Current Use: County offices and courts
Photographed: 3/13/16, 5/16, 18, 5/19/18
Sources Cited
1 “Danzebrink rebuilt courthouse’s clock” The Journal Review [Crawfordsville] May 11, 2018. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
2 “Time running out on dying wish for Montgomery Co. Courthouse clock tower?” The Journal & Courier [Lafayette] July 26, 2017. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
3 “Woman works to restore Crawfordsville clock tower” The Journal & Courier [Lafayette] March 14, 2016. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
4 Clock tower committee reflects on more than 20 years of fundraising The Journal Review [Crawfordsville] May 19, 2018. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
5 Enyart, David. “Montgomery County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2023. Web. Retrieved May 29, 2023.
6 “Wind farm debate continues at commissioner meeting” The Journal Review [Crawfordsville] October 23, 2017. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
7 “Promise kept: Courthouse clock tower, gone since WWII, returns in Crawfordsville” May 17, 2018. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
8 “Long awaited clock tower to make its way to Montgomery County courthouse” The Journal & Courier [Lafayette] May 7, 2018. Web. Retrieved 5/20/18.
