Unless you live nearby, you’ve got to be a real Indiana courthouse fan to make it down to Mt. Vernon: at 249 miles south of Muncie, Posey County features Indiana’s farthest courthouse from my home by a wide margin! It’s hard to believe, but Mt. Vernon sits about as close to Indianapolis as it does to the Arkansas state line. God help me if I ever wear out the county courthouses of the Midwest and start going to Arkansas!
Posey County is remote, and that’s a shame since the area has some neat history like the Ashworth and Hovey Lake archaeological sites, the Harmony Way Bridge, and the town of New Harmony. Unfortunately, I didn’t stop at any of those places since I came to the area solely for its courthouse. The building is one of the most unique entries in our state’s portfolio!
The current courthouse is the fourth to serve Posey County. After the county was established, its government worked from the community of Blackford for three years between 1816 and 18191. Officials founded the village specifically to serve as the county seat2. In 1819, the courthouse -thought to have been a brick “coffee mill” structure– moved to Springfield, nine miles north of Mt. Vernon at the center of the county3. Courts were only conducted there for six years until Springfield dried up and the courthouse finally moved to Mt. Vernon4. Nothing remains of Springfield today but some houses and trailers at Springfield, Darlin, and Oliver-Springfield Roads.
The first courthouse in Mt. Vernon was another brick coffee mill structure, named such by Ball State professor David Hermansen thanks to its resemblance to that archaic appliance. Officials solicited bids for a replacement in 1874. They chose Josse Vrydagh, a Belgian-born architect from Terre Haute who had been a seven-year student of the Louvain Academie des Beaux-Arts in France5.
It took two years for workers to finish the Posey County Courthouse, but the wait was worth it: the resultant building was unlike anything ever seen across Indiana’s portfolio of courthouses. It still is, and after nearly a hundred and fifty years, the 119-foot-tall, three-and-a-half-story courthouse still closely resembles Vrydagh’s original design.
The building combines Italianate details like contrasting roof brackets and window surrounds with Second Empire features like segmented triangular pediments and a mansard roof atop its lantern6. It’s an exuberant mishmash of singularity!
Like many courthouses, the building’s essentially a rectangle, albeit one with some fun protuberances. It stands above a raised limestone foundation with grated windows and a water table. That’s a different water table than the one that has to do with my favorite historical topic! In this case, a water table means a brick or stone ledge that juts out from a building’s first floor to deflect precipitation away from its foundation.
Above the water table, the building’s primary facade -its western elevation- is nearly identical to its eastern face. Both sides feature projecting, gabled pavilions around recessed entryways covered by flat-roofed, iron-columned porches and balustrades.
From bottom to top, each gabled entry exhibits two-over-two arched windows on the first floor, a second story with rectangular windows of the same construction, and matching windows with shallow arches on the third floor. At one point, the north and south sides of the courthouse were identical until a recent, windowless addition that I assume contains an elevator shaft was built that obstructed most of the building’s north face up to the pediment.
Vrydagh’s remix of Italianate and Second Empire styles is unique on its own, but the cupola he designed is what truly sets the courthouse apart from its peers. Domes are focal points for some of the most impressive county courthouses I’ve seen, and they’re often topped with little cupolas known as lanterns. The Posey County Courthouse is the opposite: its shallow dome plays second fiddle to its enormous wooden lantern, which is big enough to look like a full-fledged clock tower!
The building’s massive lantern features aediculae, or “small shrines,” visible as pilasters capped by pediments surrounding its louvered windows. Above them, the lantern culminates in a ribbed, gold-colored mansard roof with four circular dormers and a tall flagpole. The dome sits below them: although it’s hard to see, it’s there at the crux of the courthouse roof between its east and west fronts.
The Posey County Courthouse is in remarkable shape for its age, at least from the outside. Aside from the elevator addition and the removal of ten of its chimneys7, the building’s barely been altered! That said, the grounds have: residents erected a 24-tall obelisk capped with a 13-foot bronze figure of Liberty atop a graded base to commemorate Posey County’s soldiers and sailors in 1908. A Ten Commandments monument also sits elsewhere on the green, one of only a few I saw during my travels to every county in Indiana. Both add to the character of the building, and if you’re a fan of architecture headed down to Evansville or as far as Arkansas, be sure to stop in Mt. Vernon to get a glimpse of a really unique courthouse. Its tiny dome, massive lantern, and exuberant combination of styles make it a worthy addition to the state’s portfolio!
TL;DR
Posey County (pop. 45,844, 60/92)
Mt. Vernon (pop. 13,380)
88/92 photographed
Built: 1876.
Cost: $95,000 ($2.27 million in 2016)
Architect: Josse A. Vrydagh
Style: Italianate and Second Empire
Courthouse Square: Shelbyville
Height: 119 feet
Current Use: Some county courts and offices
Photographed: 7/10/2016
Sources Cited\
1 Enyart, David. “Posey County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. August 4, 2019.
2 Leffel, John C. “History of Posey County Indiana” Standard Publishing Co. [Chicago]. 1886. Print.
3 National Register of Historic Places, Posey County Courthouse, Mt. Vernon, Posey County, Indiana, National Register # 88003042.
4 Indiana Landmarks (2013). Posey County. Indianapolis. Indiana Landmarks. Web. Retrieved 8/4/19.
5 Counts, W. & Dilts, J. The 92 Magnificent Indiana Courthouses. Indiana University Press [Bloomington]. Print. 1991.
6 Posey County Interim Report: Indiana Historic Sites & Structures Inventory. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, 1985. Print.
7 Courthouse History. Keith Vincent. 2018. Web. Retrieved from http://courthousehistory.com. August 4, 2019.
