Lawrenceburg and Dearborn County were founded in 1810 as part of the Indiana Territory. That year, officials assembled a simple brick courthouse. As the county seat, Lawrenceburg was the natural epicenter of trade and politics, and the town’s strategic trading location on the Ohio River helped it become an early commercial powerhouse. Although the first courthouse burned down in 1826, a new one was built two years later.
Despite Lawrenceburg’s early successes, Dearborn County was changing by the 1820s. The town of Rising Sun sprung up in 1816 and rapidly expanded as a seasonal flatbed stop for traders2. Its growing prominence shifted the center of the county’s population center south, and the state soon took note. In 1835, the legislature demanded that the county seat move to Wilmington, between the two fledgling cities3. A $4,000 courthouse was built there the following year, and residents of the landlocked Wilmington were ecstatic with their luck.
Business owners in Lawrenceburg were not so thrilled. Their prosperity had a lot to do with being the county seat. Without it, the time was right for Rising Sun to rise up as its own undisputed center of trade. Its residents, however, were bursting with joy- they’d been campaigning to get their own county for nearly twenty years, only for the government up north to slap them back into submission. Rising Sun still wanted to be the county seat, though, so its citizens put their differences aside and hatched a plan with Lawrenceburg.
The scheme went like this: if Lawrenceburg helped petition the state to form a new county with Rising Sun as its seat, that new county would absorb enough residents to move the Dearborn County’s center of population back to Lawrenceburg and shut Wilmington down for good. It took seven years, but it worked, and Ohio County with Rising Sun as its county seat- was formed out of eighty-six miles of Dearborn County. The courts and government moved back to the previous courthouse in Lawrenceburg like nothing ever changed4, Wilmington dried up, and there’s little to be seen of the community today.
It was businesses as usual again n Lawrenceburg for two more decades before officials noticed Floyd County’s new, Greek Revival courthouse in New Albany. Enamored with its design, they commissioned architect George Kyle to design a larger version for themselves. The project took two years, but by 1873, Dearborn County had a new courthouse5.
Facing south, the building rose three stories tall and measured 101 feet long by 73 feet wide. Its ground level was composed of dressed, rusticated limestone, and an enormous pediment, supported by four Corinthian columns, sheltered the central portion of the building’s five-bay facade. If you stepped back far enough from the courthouse, you’d see a white, rectangular platform with an understated iron railing rising from the roof. It wasn’t there for external aesthetics, nor was it the remainder of a decapitated clock tower- it simply housed a skylight for courthouse’s domed rotunda.
Although the inside of the original building had been remodeled several times when I visited it in 2012 and 2015, it contained a few cool features from years past, particularly the glass dome and cast iron staircase6. Many of the offices featured original wooden doors, and the black and white marble floor around the second-floor rotunda was original.
Underneath that marble is something interesting. Originally the second-floor courtroom had a thirty-foot tall ceiling featuring a balcony, plaster moldings, cherubs, and paintings of stars and clouds. During a trial in 1902, a cherub went rogue and dropped into the jury box. The judge immediately ordered the ceiling to be dropped, but the original is still preserved just above its stamped-tin replacement today8.
Changes to the Dearborn County Courthouse didn’t just occur inside. Some big ones have been made to its grounds! In 1954, a 42-cell jail was built southeast of the old courthouse9. An expansion in 1991 gave the complex -now called the Dearborn County Law Enforcement Center- a sprawling layout that radically altered the makeup courthouse square. Some might balk at the size of the jail given the relatively-paltry population of the community it serves, but Dearborn County sends more of its citizens to jail than nearly any other county in the nation. Around one in ten adult residents there are either in prison or jail or on probation, and evidence of the high incarceration rate ruins the southwest view of the courthouse since utilitarian jail fencing hides most of it.
In the 1990s, a three-story brick administration building was completed behind the courthouse to take over most of the county’s offices. By 2004 it was clear that the county needed more room to manage its operations. Studies commenced, and plans were considered, but nothing really happened until I came by to take these photos in 2015. Weeks after I left, work started to connect the courthouse with the administration building by building a 40,000-square-foot, classically-inspired annex.
Designed by architects DLZ, the expansion added two superior courts, a prosecutor’s suite, a meeting room, a public entryway, and a basement to be utilized in the future to keep fueling Dearborn County’s prosecutors. Architecturally, the $11.7 million annex may be the best courthouse addition in the state. Its paired, fluted columns with Corinthian capitals reference those at the old building’s entrance, and the dresse, limestone facade and six-over-six windows of its first floor match the old courthouse nearly perfectly. Though the annex only rises two stories to the original building’s three and there’s an awful lot of glass used around its semicircular entryway, I have no complaints. If all of our modern justice centers looked this good, I’d have happily included them in my project.
I wish I could show you the annex, but I haven’t returned to Lawrenceburg. Nonetheless, I’m glad that Dearborn County was able to build such a well-thought-out addition. While early political wrangling determined the locations of five different area courthouses, later political decisions regarding criminal prosecution kept the old building functioning and viable. It’s beyond my pay grade to contemplate the veracity of a county’s prosecution strategy, but Dearborn County’s decisions have allowed for the retention and expansion of a historic courthouse. That’s a win for architecture fans.
TL;DR
Dearborn County (pop. 49,904, 27/92)
Lawrenceburg (pop. 5,031)
37/92 photographed
Built: 1873
Cost: S135,775 ($2.71 million in 2016)
Architect: George Kyle
Style: Neoclassical
Courthouse Square: Modified Shelbyville Square
Height: 3 stories
Current use: Some county offices and courts
Photographed: 8/23/15
Sources Cited
1 “Indiana Land Area Rank” USA.com. World Media Group, LLC. 2019. Web. Retrieved 10/1/19.
2 History of Dearborn and Ohio Counties, Indiana. Chicago: F. E. Weakley & Company. 1885. p. 448.
3 Enyart, David. “Dearborn County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. July 18, 2018.
4 Enyart, David. “Ohio County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. July 18, 2018.
5 Indiana Landmarks (2013). Shelby County. Indianapolis. Indiana Landmarks. Web. Retrieved 10/1/19.
6 National Register of Historic Places, Dearborn County Courthouse, Lawrenceburg, Dearborn County, Indiana, National Register # 81000008.
7 “Envisioning a new look for our courthouse” The Noblesville Ledger [Noblesville]. February 13, 1993: 2. Print.
8 “Dearborn County, Indiana Courthouse, Lawrenceburg, Indiana”. History In Your Own Backyard. YouTube. March 23, 2017. Web. Retrieved 10/1/19.
9 “Dearborn County Is To Build Jail”. Anderson Daily Bulletin [Anderson]. October 6, 1954. 13. Print.
10 “A Small Indiana County Sends More People to Prison Than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., Combined. Why?” The New York Times [New York]. September 2, 2016. Web. Retrieved 10/1/19.
11 “Dearborn Co. Courthouse Annex On Track For Fall Opening” Eagle Country 99.3 FM. Wagon Wheel Broadcasting. September 5, 2017. Web. Retrieved 10/1/19.
