Tag Richardson Romanesque

The Williams County, Ohio Courthouse (1891-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 5 min.

Many communities built landmark courthouses in response to newfound economic status. Money -or the prospect of it- burned a hole in their pockets! Occasionally, cities experienced the opposite when businesses rose to meet the status of their existing courthouse. Bryan, Ohio, was once such community. In Williams County, the area’s industry grew up under the watchful eye of its amazing courthouse.

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The Pickaway County, Ohio Courthouse (1847/1889-)

Ted Shideler 3 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

Circleville, Ohio, is laid out in blocks. You wouldn’t guess it by looking at a map today, but the town got its name from an abandoned Lenape earthwork -an Indian mound- that once measured 1,100 feet in diameter1. Circleville was founded on top of it after Pickaway County was established in 1810. The town’s original layout radiated outward from the center of the mound2.

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The Noble County, Indiana Courthouse (1887-)

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

I’ve admired the Noble County Courthouse in Albion since I was a kid. I remember driving past it with my dad and even going inside it for some reason. Even at a young age, I knew the courthouse was unique: it didn’t resemble any others in the state and though I seem to recall a taxidermy display in its basement, I never expected the building to tell an intricate tale of geopolitical maneuverings. Of course, that’s what I found when I started researching it.

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The Blackford County Courthouse in Indiana (1894-)

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

Although it’s been long since bypassed by the interstate, Indiana State Road 3 still provides a scenic route through the countryside of northeastern Indiana that can be traveled pretty fast. I became acquainted with the road from trips to visit family during my childhood, but it took constant weekend drives back home to Muncie from my Fort Wayne apartment to become really close with it. Without question, the highway’s most prominent landmark is the Blackford County Courthouse in Hartford City. I eventually wondered how such an impressive courthouse wound up in a county seat that seemed so small.

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The Tipton County, Indiana Courthouse (1894-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 6 min.

I initially thought my project to document all of Indiana’s courthouses would be more cut-and-dried than it turned out. I figured I’d go to each county, take one definitive photo of one historic courthouse, and that’d be that. Of course, that’s not what happened, but being able to rank the buildings in terms of height helps me quantify them in a somewhat orderly fashion, even if the data’s not always there for each one.

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The Cass County, Michigan Courthouse (1899-2003)

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 8 min.

Cassopolis, Michigan has a highfalutin name. For many years, it was all I knew about the place aside from my assumption that Cassopolis Street in Elkhart probably went there. A couple of years ago, I had an opportunity to test my theory, and it was successful! But any thoughts about the community’s purported stature went out the car window as soon as I arrived: I wasn’t expecting some sprawling metropolis like Kalamazoo or Saginaw, but Cassopolis -officially the Village of Cassopolis- has a population of only around 1,600 people. There’s a couple of rows of old storefronts, a New Formalist bank from the 1960s, a True Value hardware store, and an old school greasy-spoon called The Twirl. There’s also a massive courthouse right at the corner of M-60 and M-62.

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The Paulding County, Ohio Courthouse (1888-)

Ted Shideler 3 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

Paulding County is a desolate place, and I was not shocked to find out that it is the sixth-least-populated county in all of Ohio1. Perfect- I love locales like that, especially since it lately seems like the my head has been the sixth-least populated cranium in all of Muncie over the past few weeks. Even though two federal highways -US-24 and US-127- run through Paulding County and make it more accessible than ever before, we can probably chalk the sparse population of the place to first impressions.

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The Rush County, Indiana Courthouse (1896-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 5 min.

Some of the first settlers in Rush County were Quakers who migrated from North Carolina and Virginia in protest of slavery and settled in the township in 1821, a year before the county was formally organized. Though the county jail was the first public building constructed in Rush County, the first courthouse followed a year later in 1823.

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