Morrow County Courthouse And Jail

About this property

The Morrow County Courthouse is a historic government building in the village of Mount Gilead, Ohio, United States. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century, it has served as the county courthouse since Morrow County's earliest years, and it has been named a historic site. One of Ohio's youngest counties, Morrow County was organized in 1848 to relieve local residents: its land had previously been part of five different counties, and the residents experienced substantial difficulty in participating in county government because the distance to all five county seats was excessive. Incorporated in 1839, Mount Gilead has been the county seat for Morrow County since its formation. Foreseeing the possibility that a new county would be created, the inhabitants improved their village's public spaces in the late 1840s. Accordingly, the county courts and county commissioners undertook their business in the village, fulfilling their duties in assorted buildings because of the lack of a dedicated courthouse: the law that organized the county provided that $7,000 (then a large sum) must be donated by private citizens or that two years must pass without the donation of $7,000 before county officials might levy taxes for the erection of a courthouse and jail. Most county offices were located in a long two-story frame house, which stood on the two lots where the courthouse now stands, although the county courts met in the Baptist Church. By mid-1849, the necessary funds had been raised, and on 7 July 1849 the county commissioners began advertising for bids for a jail building, which was completed somewhat more than a year later. More than two years passed before the commissioners were ready to construct a courthouse: they began advertising for bids in March 1852, and the project was officially completed on 15 July 1854. In its early years, the courthouse served a wide variety of community purposes: for example, the county's first medical association was formed at the courthouse in 1850, the Universalist church worshipped in the courtroom until 1861, and the village spelling bee was held at the courthouse in the 1870s. By 1880, the architecture of the 1850s had fallen into disfavor: a county history published in that year noted that the courthouse "possess[ed], however, little beauty or modern appearance" and suggested that county money be spent on "modernizing the ungainly structure." Sixteen years passed before any substantial changes were made; in 1896, the building was expanded, and the facade was modified with some modernizing changes, but the building's basic plan remained. The next substantial change occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s: the increasing availability of federal money prompted local officials to apply for and receive a grant, with which they again modified the building's appearance and added a new courtroom inside a new wing on the building's rear. No substantial changes have been made since that time.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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