Read time: 6 min.

You wouldn’t know it from all the cornfields, but Indiana is slowly turning into a suburban state. From 2015 to 2050, STATS Indiana projects that only 19 of our 92 counties will increase in population by more than 10%. Fourteen more will see population increases of up to 10%, and most are next to Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Evansville¹. Unfortunately, rural places like Jay County are projected to decline. That’s a shame since its county seat, Portland, is home to a fantastic courthouse.

The Jay County Courthouse is a building that does its constituency proud. Faced in Bedford limestone, the east and west facades of the neoclassical courthouse are identical, with eleven window bays each. The north and south sides of the courthouse are much narrower- five bays wide, with paired Ionic columns that support a frieze. From the outside, the building gives an impression of solidarity and a lack of ostentatiousness. The inside is different: it’s hard to see from the street, but the courthouse’s pediment hides a glass dome that brings sunlight into an elaborate interior rotunda².

Historic courthouses anchor some of Indiana’s most vibrant downtowns, but people still flock to the big cities instead of places like Portland. Jay is one of fifty-nine of Indiana’s counties -a whopping 64%- projected to shrink by up to 32% over the next twenty-seven years³! You’d find ground zero of the coming exodus if you painted a straight blue line down the west side of the state followed by a diagonal slash from LaPorte to Brookville.

That’s not great. Democracy in America only works if its citizens invest in it, if I remember my DeTocqueville correctly. For people in rural areas like Jay County, buying into the traditional American system means seeing the fruits of your labor benefit the places you live and work. I think about those tenets every time I drive through towns like Portland!

Here in East-Central Indiana, Jay County is notorious for consolidating eight different high schools into a countywide system in 1975⁴. Closing schools and post offices might be necessary from a business standpoint, but they undermine the livelihoods of the small towns where they’re located. Many of Jay County’s rural post offices have also closed over the years⁵, and none of the area’s incorporated communities have seen net growth since 1980. That includes Portland, which is surprising given its landmark courthouse and singular commercial strip.

It may come as some surprise to people who travel through the place on Highway 127 today, but Jay County was a boom town around the turn of the twentieth century when natural gas was discovered there. The county’s third courthouse was built in 1875 and featured a multi-tiered clock tower. Unfortunately, it was too small to keep up with the demands of the area’s prosperity during the gas boom. Interestingly, when it came time for officials to commission a replacement, they made the decision to forgo a tower.

The Jay County Courthouse is one of only two courthouses built across the state from 1904 to 1929 that doesn’t have a clock. There’s no clock tower and there’s no clock in a pediment above a colonnade. There’s nothing! Portland doesn’t even have a separate, freestanding clock installed anywhere near the grounds like some other counties do.

The reason is simple: although most men wore a pocket watch from the 16th century through the early 1900s, only women tended to wear wristwatches. They were considered feminine! During World War I, though, soldiers needed convenient access to the time to help coordinate troop movements and synchronize attacks, and watches came back into prominence. By 1917, nearly all enlisted men wore their newfound ‘wristlet watches,’ and they kept wearing them once the came home. Everyone had a clock on their wrist by the time the Jay County Courthouse was planned, so it wasn’t important to see what hour it was broadcast over every building in town.

The war impacted those involved in building the courthouse. After the fighting stopped, the economy bankrupted the courthouse project’s contractor, a hapless gent named Dawson. He originally signed the contract to build the place in 1915, before the US entered the war⁶.

Neoclassical courthouses like Jay County’s are common around Indiana since they replaced the buildings erected during the first big boom from the 1850s through the 1870s. County courthouses in Auburn, Danville, Spencer, Delphi, Sullivan, Newport, and elsewhere all feature similar designs, but the one in Portland doesn’t fit the generic mold that architects like Elmer Dunlap and John Bayard established. Its architects, McLaughlin and Hulsken, should be commended!

The neoclassical design of the Jay County Courthouse obviously serves as a callback to the permanence of the structures of ancient Greece and Rome, which is important for a place with an uncertain future. Although it’s not the tallest or most ornate county courthouse I’ve ever seen, it still manages to anchor downtown Portland in a dramatic fashion from its spot on a side street. As best I can tell, the only taller building in the county is the burned-out Haynes Mill dog food plant on the way to the fairgrounds. 

Sort of poetic, isn’t it? Though the fate shared by most communities across my part of Indiana will almost certainly ensure a declining population, at least we have another unique, historic courthouse to visit. Despite challenging headwinds, I hope the old building stands a source of pride for the community for many years to come.

TL;DR
Jay County (pop. 20,945, 70/92)
Portland (pop. 6,143).
Built: 1916
17/92 photographed
Cost: $$400,000 ($8.78 million in 2016)
Architect: McLaughlin and Hulsken
Style: Neoclassical
Courthouse Square: Shelbyville Square
Height: 3 stories
Current use: County offices and courts
Photographed: 8/16/15

Sources Cited
1 “Population and Housing Unit Estimates”. United States Census Bureau. Web. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
2 National Register of Historic Places, Washington County Courthouse, Portland, Jay County, Indiana, National Register #81000016.
3 “Indiana Population Projection Maps and Visualizations”. STATS Indiana. Indiana University. Web. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
4 Shreve, Mason. “Once there were eight”. The Commercial Review [Portland]. Print. June 27, 2015.
5 Forte, Jim. United States and Worldwide Postal History. Web. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
6 Enyart, David. “Jay County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. February 5, 2019.