The Allen County Courthouse (1897–1902) — Brentwood Tolan's Beaux-Arts Landmark

The present courthouse is the fourth to serve Allen County. Its predecessor, a brick building of 1861–62 designed by Edwin May of Indianapolis, had deteriorated so badly by the 1890s that replacement was unavoidable; a proposal to house city and county together was abandoned, the mayor built a city hall, and the county commissioners built this courthouse. Brentwood S. Tolan, of the Fort Wayne firm his father Thomas had founded, drew the design. The cornerstone was laid on November 17, 1897, in what the building's historical marker calls the largest public ceremony held in Fort Wayne to that time, and the building was dedicated on September 23, 1902, at a final cost of $817,553.59 — the cost survives to the cent.

It is a full-dress Beaux-Arts composition in Bedford limestone and Vermont granite with Italian marble inside: a copper-clad dome and rotunda rising 255 feet, topped by a 14-foot statue-weathervane of Lady Liberty; five courtrooms, each with its own color scheme; four rotunda murals 25 by 45 feet by Charles Holloway, with further mural and art-glass work in which the painters Florian Piexotto and Carl Gutherz also had a hand; bas-reliefs; and scagliola — imitation marble — in 28 varieties spread across some 15,000 square feet. The skylights were covered over during the Second World War and artificial light substituted. A tunnel under Main Street connects the courthouse to the City-County Building across the street, and a fallout shelter survives below.

The courthouse was listed on the National Register on May 28, 1976. The Allen County Courthouse Preservation Trust's restoration, begun in 1994 at a cost of $8.6 million, returned the murals, scagliola, stained glass and original light fixtures — some recast from the original 1902 molds — and the building was rededicated on its centennial, September 23, 2002, still a working courthouse. On July 31, 2003, the Secretary of the Interior designated it a National Historic Landmark, the federal citation calling it a rare example of the culmination of classical form, fine art and applied ornamentation in an American county courthouse.

Sources: National Historic Landmark designation summary, Allen County Courthouse (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2003); Allen County Courthouse historical marker (Journal-Gazette Foundation and ARCH); Allen County Courthouse Preservation Trust; Wikipedia, "Allen County Courthouse (Fort Wayne, Indiana)," drawing on the National Register nomination (reference no. 76000031); ArtSmart Indiana, courthouse mural entries.