The Historic Delaware County Courthouse is located at 91 N Sandusky St, Delaware, OH 43015 in

Delaware, Ohio Delaware is a city in Delaware County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is located near the center of Ohio, about north of Columbus as part of the Columbus metropolitan area. The population was 41,302 at the 2020 census. Delaware ...

. The courthouse was placed on the National Register.

History

Delaware County was established in 1807 by an act of the

Ohio General Assembly The Ohio General Assembly is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Ohio. It consists of the 99-member Ohio House of Representatives and the 33-member Ohio Senate. Both houses of the General Assembly meet at the Ohio Statehouse in Colu ...

. The county seat was placed at

Berkshire Berkshire ( ; abbreviated ), officially the Royal County of Berkshire, is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Oxfordshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the north-east, Greater London ...

until 1808 when Delaware was founded and successfully petitioned to be the county seat. The courts met in various locations until a courthouse was built in 1815. The building cost the county $8,000 and was a simple one story building. The building contained fire walls to protect the structure from burning, but a fire struck the building towards the end of the 1800s forcing the county to rent a different location. A new courthouse was chosen and planned in 1868 in the

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

style and designed by Robert N. Jones. The courthouse cost the county $80,000 to build. In 1996, the county renovated the courthouse for six months at a cost of $500,000. The county is faced with a growing population and a new Justice Center is currently under construction. That building is scheduled for completion and occupancy in August or September 2017. The General and Domestic Relations Divisions of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas will move to the new building as will the Public Defender's Office, the Delaware County Clerk of Courts, the adult probation office, and a meeting room for the grand jury. The county has announced plans to renovate the historic courthouse, and a facilities use study is underway to determine which county offices will occupy the building once renovated.

Exterior

The square two-story structure is built of red bricks. The main facade contains a central projection capped with a

pediment Pediments are a form of gable in classical architecture, usually of a triangular shape. Pediments are placed above the horizontal structure of the cornice (an elaborated lintel), or entablature if supported by columns.Summerson, 130 In an ...

. The door sits in a recessed alcove and is contained within an arch faced with stone blocks. A window above contains two thin arched windows within an arched recess. To either side of the projection are two arched windows, the lower windows being shorter with squat arches and the top floor containing longer fully arched windows. Each window is surrounded by decorative stone casings. The

hipped roof A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downward to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope, with variants including tented roofs and others. Thus, a hipped roof has no gables or other vertical sides ...

rises to a central square drum supporting a dome topped by a statue of

Justice In its broadest sense, justice is the idea that individuals should be treated fairly. According to the ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', the most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the ''Institutes (Justinian), Inst ...

. A wrought iron railing runs around the drum and arched windows light the floors below.

History

Exterior

References

Further reading