Allen County Courthouse: Lima's Victorian Crown

Rising over downtown Lima is one of the more ornate county courthouses in Ohio, a three-story brown sandstone building in the Second Empire style built between eighteen eighty-one and eighteen eighty-four. Architect George Maetzel gave it mansard roofs at every corner, a central stone cupola with a clock, murals inside, stained glass, and polychrome tile floors, a statement that Allen County intended to be taken seriously.

Lima was earning that ambition. Oil had been discovered nearby in the eighteen eighties, making Allen County one of the early production centers of Ohio's petroleum boom. John D. Rockefeller called Lima crude the worst oil in the country because of its high sulfur content and initially refused to buy it, until a chemist found a way to refine it cleanly. Within a decade Lima was a significant industrial city. The courthouse that went up during that boom still stands as the center of county government, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since nineteen seventy-four, its clock tower visible from every direction into town.