Tag second empire

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 Bartholomew County, Indiana Courthouse (1874-)

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Read time: 5 min.

Columbus is home to a superb collection of remarkable architecture- it almost has to be to live up to its nickname, “the Athens of the Prairie!” Standout architects like I.M. Pei, Elder and Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, and Harry Weese all contributed to the city’s inventive skyline, but Isaac Hodgson got there first: His Bartholomew County Courthouse was hailed as the “finest in the West1” when it was completed in 1874.

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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 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 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 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 Tippecanoe County Courthouse in Indiana (1884-)

Ted Shideler 1 Comment
Read time: 6 min.

Mark Twain came to Lafayette a year after the Tippecanoe County Courthouse was built. The sardonic old humorist was impressed by the structure, even going as far as calling it striking. “Very striking indeed,” he quipped. “I should judge that the courthouse struck the taxpayers a very hard blow1!”  

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The Seneca County Courthouse in Ohio (2017-)

Ted Shideler 8 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

It’s rare for a historic courthouse to be demolished, and it’s less common to see a downtown flourish afterward. Nevertheless, both of those things happened in Tiffin, Ohio, in 2017. For a modern building, the Seneca County Justice Center credibly anchors Tiffin’s city center, and its construction led to a historic rebirth of the city.

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The Adams County Courthouse in Indiana (1872-)

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 6 min.

Indiana is littered with counties that have been forced to decapitate their courthouses over the years due to natural disasters or structural problems. Although you wouldn’t know it today at first glance, Adams County’s in Decatur is one of them. Its architect, J.C. Johnson, seemed particularly bad at designing clock towers. I guess that’s what’s bound to happen when you’re a self-taught courthouse architect1.

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