The Van Wert County Courthouse is a historic governmental building in downtown Van Wert,

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

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. Located at 121 E. Main Street, the courthouse is a Second Empire structure built in 1876. It is Van Wert County's third courthouse: when the county was established, the village of Willshire was designated the

county seat A county seat is an administrative center, seat of government, or capital city of a county or parish (administrative division), civil parish. The term is in use in five countries: Canada, China, Hungary, Romania, and the United States. An equiva ...

; Van Wert was made the seat in 1838, and a courthouse-and-

jail A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where people are imprisoned under the authority of the state, usually as punishment for various cr ...

complex was built in that community in the following year. Designed by T.J. Tolan, an architect from

Fort Wayne, Indiana Fort Wayne is a city in Allen County, Indiana, United States, and its county seat. Located in northeastern Indiana, the city is west of the Ohio border and south of the Michigan border. The city's population was 263,886 at the 2020 census ...

, the courthouse is a square structure with towers on all four corners. Its architecture combines copious amounts of brick and stone: the foundation and the walls of the first floor are stone, along with the

pilaster In architecture, a pilaster is both a load-bearing section of thickened wall or column integrated into a wall, and a purely decorative element in classical architecture which gives the appearance of a supporting column and articulates an ext ...

s, columns, and

quoins Quoins ( or ) are masonry blocks at the corner of a wall. Some are structural, providing strength for a wall made with inferior stone or rubble, while others merely add aesthetic detail to a corner. According to one 19th-century encyclopedia, ...

on the upper parts of the exterior, while the walls of the remaining stories and of the tower are built of brick.Owen, Lorrie K., ed. ''Dictionary of Ohio Historic Places''. Vol. 2. St. Clair Shores: Somerset, 1999, 1366. Tolan employed multiple groundbreaking construction techniques throughout the structure, such as pressed

steel Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that demonstrates improved mechanical properties compared to the pure form of iron. Due to steel's high Young's modulus, elastic modulus, Yield (engineering), yield strength, Fracture, fracture strength a ...

; his success in using these innovations earned recognition for both him and the courthouse in a national

trade journal A trade magazine, also called a trade journal or trade paper (colloquially or disparagingly a trade rag), is a magazine or newspaper whose target audience is people who work in a particular trade or industry. The collective term for this a ...

.Van Wert County Courthouse

Supreme Court of Ohio The Supreme Court of the State of Ohio is the highest court in the U.S. state of Ohio, with final authority over interpretations of Ohio law and the Ohio Constitution. The court has seven members, a chief justice and six associate justices, ...

, n.d. Accessed 2010-08-20. Rising above the front of the courthouse is a

clock tower Clock towers are a specific type of structure that house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another building ...

with a statue of

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placed in a niche. Made of

zinc Zinc is a chemical element; it has symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is a slightly brittle metal at room temperature and has a shiny-greyish appearance when oxidation is removed. It is the first element in group 12 (IIB) of the periodic tabl ...

, the statue is tall; before its installation at the courthouse, it was awarded first place in a

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

sculpture competition. Today, county officials continue to use the courthouse for everyday operations. Among the offices in the courthouse are those of the county

treasurer A treasurer is a person responsible for the financial operations of a government, business, or other organization. Government The treasury of a country is the department responsible for the country's economy, finance and revenue. The treasure ...

, the county

recorder Recorder or The Recorder may refer to: Newspapers * ''Indianapolis Recorder'', a weekly newspaper * ''The Recorder'' (Massachusetts newspaper), a daily newspaper published in Greenfield, Massachusetts, US * ''The Recorder'' (Port Pirie), a newsp ...

, the county

audit An audit is an "independent examination of financial information of any entity, whether profit oriented or not, irrespective of its size or legal form when such an examination is conducted with a view to express an opinion thereon." Auditing al ...

or, and the Van Wert County Common Pleas Court. Some other county agencies maintain offices in other locations, such as the county

sheriff A sheriff is a government official, with varying duties, existing in some countries with historical ties to England where the office originated. There is an analogous, although independently developed, office in Iceland, the , which is common ...

and the

county commission A county commission (or a board of county commissioners) is a group of elected officials (county commissioners) collectively charged with administering the county government in some states of the United States. A county usually has three to fiv ...

ers. In 1974, the Van Wert County Courthouse was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

, becoming the first building in the county to receive this distinction. It qualified for inclusion because of its well-preserved historic architecture, which was seen as significant statewide.,

Ohio Historical Society Ohio History Connection, formerly The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society and Ohio Historical Society, is a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1885. Headquartered at the Ohio History Center in Columbus, Ohio, Ohio History Connect ...

, 2007. Accessed 2010-08-20.

References

External links

Van Wert County
{{NRHP in Van Wert County, Ohio Government buildings completed in 1876 County courthouses in Ohio Courthouses on the National Register of Historic Places in Ohio National Register of Historic Places in Van Wert County, Ohio Second Empire architecture in Ohio Van Wert, Ohio Buildings and structures in Van Wert County, Ohio Clock towers in Ohio