Tag clock tower

The Vanderburgh County, Indiana Courthouse (1891-1969)

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Read time: 7 min.

My parents divorced when I was three. Money was tight, but my mom sacrificed to shield us from knowing we were poor. One time, she found the funds to take my siblings and me on a day trip to the Mesker Park Zoo in Evansville. I fell in love with the old Vanderburgh County Courthouse that day. It was the first historic courthouse I ever set foot in, and I was blown away! I felt the same when I visited again twenty years later.

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The Warrick County, Indiana Courthouse (1906-)

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 6 min.

Not many know it, but future president Abraham Lincoln studied law in Boonville, Indiana. In those days, the Lincoln family homestead was considered part of Warrick County, and Lincoln often walked the twenty-mile trip from his childhood home to study the law and watch local attorneys practice in a succession of poorly-built wooden courthouses. If he’d lived to be a hundred, Honest Abe would have found a real gem.

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The Posey County, Indiana Courthouse (1876-)

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Read time: 6 min.

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!

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The Hamilton County, Indiana Courthouse (1879-1992)

Ted Shideler 6 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

Six-year-old me spent a lot of time in the back seat traveling across the state to a family Christmas here or an Easter there. The historic courthouses I saw on those trips made a massive impression on me! I spent hours drawing each I came across and knew that the Hamilton County Courthouse in downtown Noblesville was truly special.

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The Union County, Ohio Courthouse (1883-)

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Read time: 7 min.

Commissioners in Union County, Ohio -named so due to its formation from segments of Franklin, Delaware, Logan, and Madison counties- chose Toledo architect David W. Gibbs to design the original iteration of the current courthouse. Gibbs was one of Ohio’s most prolific architects of public buildings, and he designed five courthouses in the state, along with two more in Michigan.

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The Franklin County, Indiana Courthouse (1852/1877/1912-)

Ted Shideler 3 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

Here’s some advice for all of you could-be courthouse contractors: although top-loading a house with roofing materials may be fine for a suburban ranch, try it at your peril while renovating an old courthouse. You’d hate to suffer the same fate our neighbors down in Brookville did back in 1877!

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The Defiance County, Ohio Courthouse (1873-)

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Read time: 8 min.

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.

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The restored Montgomery County, Indiana Courthouse (1876-)

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Read time: 7 min.

The Montgomery County Courthouse was built in 1876. Sixty-five years later, an artist commissioned to paint the building noticed that the tower appeared to be leaning. It was wartime, and officials acted in haste by decapitating the courthouse, melting its bell down, and dumping the clockworks by the county highway barn. A local jeweler rescued the clock and put it up at his store downtown1, but the rest was history.

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The Henry County, Indiana Courthouse (1869-)

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Read time: 5 min.

Jot this down: “It must be free from dampness, which would destroy the precious records of the county, on which so much of the ‘peace and quiet’ of our community depends. It must, of course, be fire proof and sufficiently commodious for all legitimate purposes not only now, but for many years to come; must be of durable materials, and last, it must be ‘good looking,’ a monument of the enterprise and taste of the people of one of the wealthy counties of the State1.” That’s the edict Henry County officials delivered in 1864 before they took bids on a new courthouse to replace one that had been lost to fire.

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The Fayette County, Indiana Courthouse (1849/1891-)

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Read time: 6 min.

The Fayette County Courthouse has a weird design unlike any of its peers in Indiana. In fact, some of it dates all the way back to 1849! By that measure, it’s the second oldest courthouse still in use in Indiana. You wouldn’t know that by looking at it, though, since almost all the visible parts of the building resulted from an extensive 1891 renovation that vastly increased its size and ornamentation.

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