The Old Courthouse museum — eighty-eight years in a courtroom building

1906 – 1994

The gift of a building: When the county built its third courthouse and moved the second one — the Van Osdel courthouse of 1853–55 — off the square in the winter of 1895–96, the old building's future hung open. By June 1899 there were still no firm plans for it, and some in the city suggested giving it to the Northern Indiana Historical Society. In 1906 the county did just that. The society took the old courthouse, a building already half a century old and already once picked up and moved, and made its museum there.

The long tenancy: The second courthouse served as the city's local history museum until 1994 — eighty-eight years in which the county's relics, portraits, pioneer tools and paper memory were kept in a former courtroom building a few steps from the courthouse square where the county's business still went on. It is the longest museum tenancy in this record, and the least documented in its daily detail: the society's museum was simply there, through two world wars, the Studebaker collapse and the renewal era, in the building the county had given it. When the society left in 1994 for the Washington and Chapin campus, the old courthouse went back to the work it was built for — it is in court use still, as the Architecture record tells.

Sources:

1. Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour, "St. Joseph County Courthouses" — the unplanned second courthouse in June 1899, the suggestion it be given to the society, the gift of 1906, the museum tenancy until 1994, and the building's later return to court use.
2. The Architecture record of this history — the second courthouse's building history, its move of 1895–96 and its present court use.