The Defiance County Courthouse was built in 1873. It spent eighty-five years as one of Ohio’s finest Second Empire structures before an unfortunate renovation turned it into the most hysterically ugly building I’ve ever seen. In 2016, it was renovated in a process that borrowed elements from both iterations to give the building a new lease on life.
Originally, Defiance was the seat of Williams County, which was established in 1824. The expansive area was subdivided over time, which made the city of Bryan closer to the center of the county’s population. In 1845, Defiance was made the seat of a new county, and courts were initially held in a brick schoolhouse until John Botasta designed and built a Greek Revival structure to replace it in 18451.
The population of Defiance County had nearly tripled by 1870, so commissioners hired a self-taught architect, J.C. Johnson, to design a replacement for the twenty-five-year-old courthouse. Despite his lack of academic credentials, Johnson completed three other buildings in Indiana during the 1870s. Each of them is still in use today, and the four siblings feature similar design cues like contrasting brick and Berea sandstone and vermiculated quoins and keystones2. They’re striking buildings! Unfortunately, they all shared another genetic similarity that wasn’t so great: J.C. Johnson wasn’t very good at designing clock towers.
Johnson’s towers looked fine, but they suffered from poor planning. His first courthouse from the 1870s was built in Adams County, Indiana. As early as 1900, commissioners there realized that its design provided inadequate support for the central tower of the twenty-eight-year-old building, which had been moved from the front of the structure at the last minute to fit in with an emergent trend known as “county capitol.” The tower was promptly removed and replaced two years later with a more sound design supplied by a competitor4.
Elsewhere in the Hoosier State, it took the abnormally-narrow 100-foot tall tower at Johnson’s 1875 Randolph County Courthouse more than eighty years to be taken down after the state Fire Marshall noted that it had shifted from its original supports and that its exposed wooden beams made it a firetrap5. Thankfully, its tower and mansard roof were restored in 2011.
The courthouse tower in Noblesville lasted the longest by far until a $4 million renovation in the mid-1990s replaced the rotten, wooden landmark perched atop the 1879 structure5. Although the process of fixing Johnson’s faulty Indiana clocktowers occurred over a century, care was taken in each instance to ensure the courthouses remained vibrant landmarks at the century of each downtown. What happened in Defiance was different. The building changed forever in 19586.
This is Indiana’s Porter County Courthouse in Valparaiso. As you can see, the top floor doesn’t match the rest of the building, the result of a 1934 fire that destroyed its clock tower, hipped roof, and rooftop statues. Officials there were forced to wait three years before completing the building’s renovation, spending much of that time meeting in the burned-out basement. Though the modern appearance of the courthouse is dramatically different than the grandiosity of its original design, the renovation matched its color, preserved some of its ornamentation, and alluded to features still present on the bottom levels of the courthouse.
In 1957, Defiance COunty officials began a $160,000 project to renovate and reconstruct the building’s roof and fourth floor after state officials condemned the upper stories of the courthouse as unsafe7. J.C. Johnson’s curse had struck again! Removing its clock tower and bell reduced the load on the courthouse roof by five-hundred pounds8, but the project, which was completed the following year, made no attempt to harmonize the new areas with what already existed. The contrast was severe. The hatchet-job was grisly!
I remember seeing Django Unchained at the old Mounds Mall 10 in Anderson with my brother. The movie features a scene where someone gets murdered so abruptly I instinctively cackled in the middle of the showing! I don’t think I’m a psychopath, but I laughed out loud because the contrast was so great. That’s what I meant when I said the remodeled Defiance County Courthouse was hysterically ugly. You almost can’t believe your eyes when you see a picture of it. I couldn’t.
Ensure that building materials don’t jettison themselves into the streets is important, but it’s equally crucial to use a scalpel instead of a chainsaw when renovating old landmarks like courthouses. Sympathetic additions ensure that new elements seamlessly blend with an existing structure. They maintain a building’s overall aesthetic harmony, and preserve the continuity of a community’s cultural heritage! The 1958 revision did neither of those things. Although arched window infills were added to the building’s new third story in later years, they did little to help its aesthetics. The courthouse was an embarrassment.
The 1958 project did more than ruin the exterior of the courthouse. It also seriously compromised the integrity of its interior by removing much of its woodwork and marble9. In 2006, voters rejected a sales tax increase to raise $13 million to tear the building down and make room for new government offices10. Commissioners believed it wasn’t the building’s history that motivated residents to vote against demolishing it. They were just opposed to the new tax11!
Courthouse fan that I am, I’m not sure I would have chosen to save the compromised courthouse if I lived in Defiance and was old enough to vote in seventeen years ago. Thankfully, it was granted a stay in 2015, when voters approved a less expensive, $1.5 million project overseen by DLZ -an architectural firm with experience working on several other historic structures- to demolish and replace the building’s roof, clean its masonry, remove the third-floor parapet, and add a new mansard roof and cupola12.
The resultant iteration of the courthouse, the third, is an enormous step up from the second version, particularly given the project’s frugal budget and inventive reuse of its third story. Although it looks little like J.C. Johnson originally intended, the current structure fits a modern interpretation of the American exuberance that ran rampant during the great courthouse boom of 1870-1910, when architects were content to mash up different styles into new landmarks.
The reimagined courthouse rises eighty feet into the sky above Defiance County, much shorter than the original’s 125-foot height. Nevertheless, the courthouse’s new cupola makes its gleaming presence known to newcomers crossing the Maumee River on Clinton Street! Before the restoration, its lopped-off, ugly half-tower got lost next to the fire escape of the low-rise Masonic Temple a block north, which was a shame.
Sympathetic renovations play a vital role towards the preservation, adaptation, and appreciation of old buildings. They enable the harmonious integration of new elements while respecting the historical, cultural, and architectural significance of extant structures. Although the silhouette of the Defiance County Courthouse no longer resembles much of J.C. Johnson’s original design, DLZ and local officials engineered the next best thing after it spent fifty-eight years as the ugliest courthouse in Ohio. Finally, residents have a building to be proud of.
TL;DR
Defiance County (pop. 38,087, 65/88)
Defiance (pop. 16,663).
Built: 1873, renovated 2016
Cost: $72,000 ($1.44 million in 2016), $1.5 million
Architect: J.C. Johnson/DLZ
Style: Second Empire
Courthouse Square: Shelbyville Square
Height: 80 feet
Current Use: County offices and courts
Photographed: 2/17/2018
Sources Cited
1 Thrane, Susan W., Patterson, B., & Patterson, T. “County Courthouses of Ohio” Indiana University Press [Bloomington]. November 1, 2000. Print.
2 National Register of Historic Places, Adams County Courthouse, Decatur, Adams County, Indiana, National Register # 8000914.
3 Enyart, David. “Architects” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. 8/9/20.
4 Dilts, Jon. The Magnificent 92 Indiana Courthouses. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 1999. Print.
5 “Envisioning a new look for our courthouse” The Noblesville Ledger [Noblesville]. February 13, 1993: 2. Print.
6 “Randolph County Officials Study Bids For Work on Historical Courthouse” The Palladium-Item [Richmond] April 15, 1954: 11. Print.
7 Brief Items From Our Neighboring Towns (1957, May 3). The Delphos Courant. p. 11.
8 Commerce Group Backs Courthouse Bond Issue (1957, October 30). The Lima News. p. 4.
8 Vincent, Keith. Courthouse History. Web. Retrieved 10/21/20.
9 “Defiance County voted no on courthouse demolition” The Toledo Blade [Toledo]. July 8, 2007. Web. Retrieved 10/20/20.
10 “Defiance Co. courthouse likely facing renovation” The Toledo Blade [Toledo]. February 1, 2016. Web. Retrieved 10/20/20.
11 (See footnote 9).
12 “Defiance County Courthouse Remodeling Project” County Commissioners Association of Ohio. Web. Retrieved 10/20/20.
