My home of Delaware County, Indiana, demolished its eighty-year-old courthouse in 1967. Fortunately, a two-hour drive is all it takes to satisfy a nostalgic craving for Muncie’s lost courthouse. Completed four years earlier, Kosciusko County’s in Warsaw is nearly identical! Architect Brentwood Tolan of Fort Wayne was responsible.
Kosciusko County was named for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish general who served in the American Revolutionary War. After it was authorized in 1835, the county was formally organized the following year1. The village of Leesburg served as a temporary county seat until 1837 when a 20×30 foot frame courthouse was erected in Warsaw.
The 1837 courthouse was destroyed by fire soon after it was built2. A larger, two-story replacement that included a jail was completed by the Cosgrove Brothers in 1839. The building lasted nine years until Ben VanCamp and Albert Basso completed a third frame structure for $42003.
The third courthouse was far more commodious than the first two and was thought to be a “fine looking structure4.” Eventually, a two-story brick office building was completed just north of the building for $4,500. Unfortunately, both required significant repairs and improvements over the years and were demolished in 1881.
Officials hired Fort Wayne architects T.J. Tolan & Son to build a true landmark the county could be proud of. Still, Brentwood Tolan had a problem. He’d been laboring as the “& Son” of his aging father, T.J., for nine years.
Brentwood’s Beaux Arts preferences were occasionally allowed to peek out through his advocacy for monumental staircases, arched windows, and classical details5, but his father’s preferences towards the waning Second Empire style usually won out in the company’s designs. Fortunately, T.J. named Brentwood chief draftsman of the firm the year it began work on the Kosciusko County Courthouse. Two years later, the elder Tolan died.
When completed, the building was undoubtedly Brentwood’s own. In fact, it was so different than what the firm had designed across Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa that Brentwood reused its design nearly verbatim four years later in my hometown! His Whitley County Courthouse in Columbia City retained many of the same features, too, albeit in a smaller footprint6.
Of the three, Warsaw’s courthouse exhibits the most nods to T.J.’s inclination towards the Second Empire. It uses mainstays of the mode like a mansard roof, central pavilions, and paired windows. Brentwood’s own preferences came into play through the building’s arched entryways, porthole dormers, tall chimneys7, and the overall style of its 165-foot tall iron clock tower that looms over downtown Warsaw like a sentinel8.
I’m a little jealous that the Kosciusko County Courthouse remains one of the finest in the country, while all that’s left of the Delaware County Courthouse are some statues of scowling Indians and a few concrete fence posts. It seems unfair that Brentwood Tolan’s landmark courthouse in Warsaw remains standing while Muncie’s has been gone for nearly sixty years.
Unfortunately, that’s the way things shake out sometimes. The contemporary opinion of our outspoken public tends to attribute the building’s demolition to governmental misfeasance, but Census figures paint a different story. Put simply, the Delaware County Courthouse was overused. By 1960, it was serving 152% of the people who lived here when it was built. That was nearly three times the number of people its twin was required to. As a result, Muncie’s aged much more rapidly.
Fortunately, the preservation of a courthouse is not the zero-sum game that occurs within its walls. I’m glad the Kosciusko County Courthouse remains standing, and the federal government seems to agree. The building was appointed to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Unfortunately, the landmark no longer houses Kosciusko County’s courts. The community’s population has increased every census since 1920 as Warsaw established itself as a major player in the world of orthopedics. A brutalist Kosciusko County Justice Building was completed across Lake Street from the venerable courthouse in 1980.
The courthouse has served solely as the home of the county’s administrative offices ever since. Nevertheless, it still anchors downtown Warsaw in a way its successor never will. Aside from church steeples, the next-tallest building near the square is an old Masonic Hall completed two years after the courthouse was9.
The 141-year-old Kosciusko County Courthouse is a point of pride for the community it serves. Whether you’re from Warsaw, Pierceton, or Syracuse, take it from me: spending the last sixty years asking itself “what if” has not been fun for the residents Delaware County! Your courthouse is a real gem.
TL;DR
Kosciusko County (pop. 77.358, 20/92)
Warsaw (pop. 13,559)
7/92 photographed
Built: 1882
Cost: $197,799.65. ($4.9 million in 2016)
Architect: T. J. Tolan & Son
Style: Neoclassical/Second Empire
Courthouse Square: Shelbyville Square
Height: 162 feet
Current use: county offices
Photographed: 8/15/15
Sources Cited
1 Tyndall, J. & Lesh, O.E. (1918). Standard history of Adams and Wells Counties. Lewis Publishing Company [Chicago]. Book.
2 Enyart, David. “Kosciusko County” Indiana County Courthouse Histories. ACPL Genealogy Center, 2010-2018. Web. Retrieved 12/29/19.
3 (See footnote 2).
4 A standard history of Kosciusko County, Indiana (1919). Lewis Publishing Co. [Chicago]. Book.
5 National Register of Historic Places, Warsaw Court House and Jail Historic District, Warsaw, Kosciusko County, Indiana, National Register # 82000046.
6 Indiana Landmarks (2013). Kosciusko County. Indianapolis. Indiana Landmarks. Web. Retrieved 12/29/19.
7 (See footnote 6).
8 (See footnote 6).
9 (Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Warsaw, Kosciusko County, Indiana. (1910). Sanborn Map Company, Nov. [Map] Web. Retrieved May 5, 2024.
