Sac County Courthouse

The Sac County Courthouse in Sac City is the third building this county has used for that purpose, and the story of how it came to be built explains a lot about small-town Iowa persistence. The first courthouse went up in eighteen sixty. A second replaced it in eighteen seventy-three. Then in eighteen eighty-eight an arsonist burned that one to the ground.

The county responded by commissioning Storm Lake architect J.M. Russell to design something built to last. The result, completed in eighteen eighty-nine, is a Romanesque Revival building of red brick, with bands of stone trim framing the windows and a grand arched entry that still faces the main street. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-one. It has been sitting in the center of this county's civic life for well over a hundred years now, which is exactly what its builders intended when they replaced what an arsonist destroyed.