Tag rural Ohio

The Darke County, Ohio Courthouse (1874-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 6 min.

Greenville, Ohio -population 13,000 or so- is an hour from my hometown of Muncie. It sits about 20 minutes into Ohio on State Road 571, a continuation of IN-28, and it’s where I decided to go first on my first courthouse trip in Ohio. Locals of my parents’ generation know the city as the home of the Triangle, a club and dance hall where they could get three-two brew, but I’d barely ever been to the place. I was twenty-seven before I saw the courthouse there.

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The Van Wert County, Ohio Courthouse (1876-)

Ted Shideler 5 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

A lot of historic courthouses were designed in a style I call “American Exuberance.” In the pioneer days, courthouses functional buildings built without any frills. Influences came flooding in from all over after the Civil War, though, and architects mashed them all up into fanciful concoctions. That’s American Exuberance, and the Van Wert County Courthouse in Ohio is a singular example of it.

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The Auglaize County, Ohio Courthouse (1894-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 8 min.

Maybe it’s due to all of the oversharing millennials like me, but being “quirky” seems to be in vogue these days. The possession of odd or unusual qualities that are ultimately endearing is a great thing, I think my cohort thinks, but although I have all manner of bizarre eccentricities and predispositions, none of them are all that adorable.

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The Putnam County, Ohio Courthouse (1912-)

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 8 min.

Susan Thrane kicks off Putnam County’s entry in her book County Courthouses of Ohio by noting that the courthouse commission’s intent was to create a structure “larger than necessary for present needs” way back in 1910. “We are not building for ourselves alone any more than the Revolutionary patriots fought for themselves 134 years ago,” officials explained. “Their blood gave us liberty today.”

“We want to give something to those who live after us. In the year A.D. 2000 may our posterity say that ‘they builded wiser than they knew1.’”

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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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