Have you ever seen one of those “there’s gotta be a better way” infomercials? My favorite is the one where some otherwise-competent everyman takes a clumsy pratfall and winds up on the floor tangled up in his own measuring tape. That’s sort of what happened to George Bunting. In 1891, the tower of his brand-new Union County Courthouse collapsed!
Union County was formed in 1821, when pieces of Wayne, Fayette, and Franklin Counties were assembled. The “union” of those lands gave the new county its name. At first, officials set up shop in Brownsville, a small community situated on a yawning bend of the White River. Liberty became county seat three years later thanks to its central location.
The first Union County Courthouse in Liberty was a 50 x 50 foot brick structure with a peaked roof and central cupola. It lasted for about thirty years before officials hired Edwin May to design a replacement. May was a prolific architect responsible for nine Indiana courthouses, and his $14,000 building in Liberty rose two stories below a large belfry1.
May’s courthouse represented a massive step up from its predecessor, but it wasn’t future-proofed. Even though Union County only grew by sixty-two people from 1850 to 1890, commissioners thought their community’s needs rapidly outpaced what the courthouse offered. Despite protestations from taxpayers, the county started soliciting bids for a new one2.
The bidding process became a squabble akin to the “courthouse wars” neighboring Wayne County experienced in the 1860s. A tangled web of Indiana architects descended on county seats for a chance to draft plans for the state’s next courthouses. In Union County, the competition was a three-way race between veterans, copycats, and rookies.
On one side was George Bunting, the old hand. An established architect behind six Indiana courthouses, Bunting was looking to pad his resume with a seventh. The McDonald Brothers of Louisville were another competitor, the rookies. They’d copied Bunting’s Johnson County Courthouse for their own in Princeton and were fresh off expanding Edwin May’s old courthouse in Greensburg.
The final team to throw their hat in the ring was the upstart Fort Wayne firm of Wing & Mahurin. Although the firm hadn’t designed a courthouse yet, both principals were former draftsmen of T.J. Tolan, who designed seven Indiana courthouses with his son Brentwood. Bunting won the job, but Wing & Mahurin went on to build five courthouses in Indiana. The McDonald Brothers were ultimately responsible for twenty across the midwest3.
Until he came to Liberty, George Bunting drew up buildings according to a general rulebook that prioritized Neoclassical or “county capitol” architectural modes. Needless to say, his Union County design turned out dramatically differently. It was his first Richardson Romanesque courthouse! Inspired by medieval architecture, the genre emphasized robust masonry, rounded arches, and rough-hewn stone that implied solidarity.
The new style is probably what led the clock tower to take a tumble. Up untill then, four of Bunting’s six Indiana courthouses featured central towers. The two that didn’t -in Bloomfield and Crawfordsville- had front-facing towers that were later removed because of structural instability. Even so, those didn’t feature the stone massing of Union County’s. I’m no architect, but I wonder if he failed to account for the extra support structure needed to keep the heavy tower vertical.
Redesigning and rebuilding the fallen tower was not an easy process. It took nine months and nearly doubled the project’s length! Although some suggest that the tower was relocated from its original location, there’s no evidence that was the case4. Today, you’d never have any clue of what happened.
More than 130 years after it was built, the Union County Courthouse remains an outstanding structure. The symmetrical main entrance faces north and is three bays wide. It features gabled wall dormers that frame a central entry arch accessed by climbing twenty monumental steps. Between the dormers, the clock tower rises four stories before terminating in a pyramidal roof above four clock faces with checkerboard motifs.
Elsewhere, the most striking features of the courthouse are its two rounded turrets at its northeast and northwest corners that match sets of paired windows with foliated lintels. The south side of the courthouse features a tall, central gable surrounded by two square towers. The building’s asymmetrical layout reminds me of other Richardson Romanesque courthouses designed by E.O. Falls.
Even though its clock tower rises 130 feet tall5, it’s hard to see the courthouse from miles away because of how US-27 and IN-44 curve into town. Once you’re in downtown Liberty, though, the building’s presence can’t be ignored. The next tallest building, an old IOOF lodge but a resale shop when I visited6, tops out at three stories.
Indiana takes its courthouses seriously, but the courthouse in Liberty is unmatched in extravagance based on the community’s modest dimensions. Union County ranks ninety-first out of ninety-two counties in terms of population. Building a courthouse of its magnitude signified an enormous commitment of county resources! Blackford is the next-smallest county to feature a comparable courthouse. Nearly twice as many people live there.
Perhaps paradoxically, Indiana’s smallest towns often retain the state’s best courthouses. Union County’s is certainly among them, and a recent $4 million renovation added an elevator and updated the elderly functional systems of the structure. Pardon the cheap shot fired at Mr. Bunting, but as long as the tower remains standing, the courthouse should remain at the forefront of prominence in Union County, and the state, for many more years to come.
TL;DR
Union County (pop. 7,277, 91/92)
Liberty (pop. 2,068).
34/92 photographed.
Built: 1890
Cost: $130,000 ($3.46 million in 2016)
Architect: George W. Bunting
Style: Richardson Romanesque
Courthouse Square: Shelbyville Square
Height: 130 feet
Current use: County offices and courts
Photographed: 8/23/15
Sources Cited
1 National Register of Historic Places, Union County Courthouse, Liberty, Union County, Indiana, National Register # 87000103.
2 Indiana Landmarks (2013). Union County. Indianapolis. Indiana Landmarks. Web. Retrieved February 11, 2024.
3 National Register of Historic Places, Gibson County Courthouse, Princeton, Gibson County, Indiana, National Register # 84001038.
4 Enyart, David. “Union County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
5 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Liberty, Union County, Indiana. Sanborn Map Company, Sep, 1892. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
6 National Register of Historic Places, Liberty Courthouse Square Historic District, Liberty, Union County, Indiana, National Register #13001018.
