The Allen County Courthouse: Indiana's Crown Jewel
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
When Fort Wayne decided in the eighteen nineties to build a new county courthouse, the city was not thinking small. It hired architect Brentwood Tolan, a local designer who had studied the great civic buildings of Europe. It imported Bedford limestone from southern Indiana, Vermont granite, and Italian marble. It hired Charles Holloway to paint four murals, each twenty five by forty five feet, depicting themes of justice and progress. The project took five years and cost eight hundred seventeen thousand dollars.
The result, dedicated on September twenty third, nineteen oh two, was a building that the senior curator of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Art later called one of the finest Beaux-Arts-style public buildings in the nation.
The numbers are worth pausing on. The copper-clad dome rises two hundred fifty five feet, topped by a fourteen-foot statue of Lady Liberty that doubles as a wind vane. Twenty eight different types of scagliola, which is decorative plasterwork that imitates marble, cover fifteen thousand square feet of interior surfaces. The dome is visible from miles away on the flat Indiana landscape.
The building survived the twentieth century intact, though barely. By the nineteen nineties it needed extensive restoration. A seven-year project completed in two thousand two cost eight point six million dollars and brought it back to its original condition for the centennial celebration.
In two thousand three, the federal government designated it a National Historic Landmark, the only county courthouse in Indiana to receive that honor, and one of very few such buildings in the entire country.
People drive past it every day on their way to courthouse business without necessarily looking up. You should look up.
