Dressed up for an election

I first visited the Sibley County Courthouse in early November 2022 just before the midterm elections. It was the end of a long day visiting sites in four different southern Minnesota counties. I had exchanged some text messages with a friend who had grown up in Gaylord and discovered that his childhood home was on the very street leading to the handsome building. As the sun was setting on one of the last days of daylight savings time I was able to get some nice “golden hour” photographs. The front of the courthouse has a beautiful carved pediment to complement a rank of Doric columns making the whole thing appear to have been airlifted straight out of ancient Greece.

The real surprise, though, as the sky darkened and the last rays of the sun disappeared below the horizon was the way the facade was lit up. Red, white, and blue spotlights shot up the columns creating a dramatic election season tableau. I wondered how many other eye-catching twilight scenes I had missed by visiting most of the buildings on my itinerary by day.

Courthouse lit up in red, white, and blue

As I read about the history of the building (and the inevitable fight between Henderson and Gaylord for the honor of being the county seat) I regretted arriving in Gaylord after the close of business. In The First 100 Years…the Minnesota State Bar Association, the description of the interior mentions a three-story octagonal rotunda, marble staircases, ebony trim, a stained glass skylight in the dome (difficult to see from the street), terrazo floors, and bronze plaques on the office doors. So, I resolved to return.

The stained glass skylight in the dome

Restored in 2001 and worth the price of admission

On an unseasonably warm day last February I returned to Gaylord and found not only a beautiful interior but an office full of welcoming county employees. One took time to personally escort me around the building, opening doors to courtrooms and showing me enormous volumes of county records that look to be housed in purpose built shelving. It’s encouraging to see a county that has a real interest in preserving the history of not only the multitude of transactions and volume of business that has occurred in over a century but also the integrity of a building that by one account is “probably the most handsome of the 20th century Beaux Arts courthouses in Minnesota.” Thank you, Sibley County employees! And, don’t forget to vote.

Richardsonian Romanesque rocks rural Minnesota

I didn’t know a lot about different architectural styles when I started my county courthouse project. Art Deco was a style from between the world wars that had caught my attention partly because it was the background to so many of the old movies that my mother loved to watch (see my earlier posts about Rice or Becker County or courthouse staircases). But as I traveled around the state I noticed that a lot of the county buildings outside the Twin Cities were much older. They were often impressive monoliths constructed of massive blocks of stone sometimes adorned with intricate carvings and soaring clock towers. Noticable hallmarks included arched doorways and windows that reminded me of churches I’d visited in Europe or round towers with conical roofs and dentil details reminiscent of fairy tale castles.

Rock County Courthouse

Built in 1888 in Luverne, this courthouse has some of the classic features of Richardsonian Romanesque

So I was not surprised to discover that an architect working in the 1870s and 80s - Henry Hobson Richardson - had mined the architectural features of Old World and ancient buildings to create a uniquely American style that became known as Richardsonian Romanesque. Though Richardson had worked mostly in New England his reputation spread steadily westward and eventually became fashionable throughout the country. It seems his work was especially popular for civic buildings like county courthouses and Minnesota still has some remarkable examples of the style.

You don’t have to like the heavy, even foreboding, Richardsonian Romanesque style to appreciate its appeal to small town Minnesotans who wanted to create a sense of grandeur, sophistication, and gravitas as their rural communities grew in importance as agricultural hubs and transportation crossroads. And it is especially hard to ignore the formidable presence of these courthouses when they dominate small town squares and at least one metropolitan city center.

Here, then, are some of the Richardsonian Romanesque courthouses in Minnesota, all built between 1870 and 1900 and still used for some kind of government business. Who knows how many more we might have had originally? During the 20th century, many counties were compelled to replace older buildings that had become too ramshackle to renovate or had even burned down. Are you a Richardsonian Romanesque fan or do you prefer something less ornate and ostentatious?

The design of "vertical circulation"

Rather than writing about a specific county courthouse in Minnesota, this blog post will feature one of my favorite components of building design - the staircase. Modern courthouses, those built in the latter half of the 20th century up to the present day typically design a staircase as a functional element, or as an Instagram post I follow recently lamented, as a “means of vertical circulation.” The stairs direct people up and down between floors to the various courtrooms and administrative offices. But, let’s be honest, most visitors these days are probably taking the elevator which older buildings have added as part of upgrades that were made in the 1990s following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In buildings from the 19th and first half of the twentieth century, the staircase was usually a grand affair. It was laid out as a stately entrance into an imposing civic structure. The steps were wide, often edged with wrought iron or carved wooden railings, sometimes leading up to a second story rotunda or a landing lit by a large arched or stained glass window. The stairs served as a gateway into the serious business of the courtrooms and county offices. Accordingly, some of my favorite interior staircases are in the older courthouses, seen more frequently outside the Twin Cities metro area. But newer courthouses, those typically from the 1930s to 1960s can have their own charm. Those designed during the Art Deco period before WWII or from the Corporate International design period after the war feature staircases of gleaming chrome, terrazzo flooring, and sleek, geometric lines.

Here are some of my favorites.

Koochiching County

Originally part of Itasca County with a county seat in Grand Rapids, International Falls, parodied as Frostbite Falls in popular culture, became the seat of the new county of Koochiching in 1904. The courthouse was finished in 1910 and features this serene staircase at its entrance.

St Louis County

Virginia became a second location for county business (the county seat being in Duluth) in 1904 when local residents advocated for somewhere closer than the distant North Shore city. The courthouse was built in 1910 and has one of the most esthetically pleasing staircases (from many angles) of all the courthouses in the state.

Rice County

The 1934 courthouse in Faribault welcomes visitors with this undulating staircase straight out of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie.

Lake County

If you’re headed to the North Shore, make a quick detour in Two Harbors when you stop for gas. The fish scale dome of the 1905 courthouse (details coming in a future blog post) and this three-flight staircase with a stained glass window at the top landing are worth a stretch of your legs.

St Louis County

St Louis County is the biggest in the state at over 6000 square miles (twice as large as the next biggest, Koochiching). Hibbing, along with Virginia, handles the legal needs of the Iron Range while Duluth, as the county seat and largest city, handles the rest. The courthouse in Hibbing makes dramatic use of stone, chrome, and terrazzo in this floating staircase design from 1954.



And a few more…





“…[the Winona County Courthouse] is typical of an era when bad art and ugly buildings abounded”

The Winona Daily News editorial from 1964 did not mince words. And yet, the imposing 1888 Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse remains standing to this day, a prime example of a style of architecture that rapidly growing Midwestern towns clearly felt represented their grand and promising futures. When I visited a few years ago it still looked like the “the Lady,” a moniker coined during the preservation efforts of the 1960s and 70s. The building’s turrets and wide arches and carved stone decorations give it the feel of a Victorian-era castle. And, its location dominates the downtown Winona landscape as travelers into the city from Wisconsin cross the bridge spanning the Mississippi River.

The newspaper’s editorial board, not to mention staff writers and the courthouse reporter, spent many years promoting the demolition of the courthouse (and a nearby post office from the same era) and advocating for the construction of a modern building worthy of Winona’s “present day growth and progress,” as a president of the Winona National Bank had argued in 1957. It was a project favored by city government and business leaders but three times rebuffed by the voters of Winona County (most resoundingly by rural voters). Ignoring the wishes of the majority of voters, the county board decided to proceed without a bonding referendum: they would build the new courthouse in multiple stages using existing funds. Gradually the old building would be demolished as the new one arose on an adjacent site.

But the board now had to contend with new, younger voices - college and high school students led the charge - for whom the protests and community organizing of the late 1960s and early 1970s provided a blueprint for their historic preservation activism. A newly formed coalition drew media attention by arranging for picket lines at the courthouse, holding fundraisers with folk, rock, and jazz music and even recording a protest song entitled Save the Lady which was sung at a board meeting. Eventually, the paper acknowledged that popular opinion had swung towards restoration and preservation of the 19th century building and urged city leaders to back such efforts. The restored building, missing some of the interior woodworking details but preserving stained glass windows and original tiled fireplaces, was rededicated in 1974. The 1890 post office had been demolished many years before.

As you cruise down the river this summer, whether on a boat or a scenic highway, make a stop in Winona to see the proud Lady.

To read more about the efforts to “Save the Lady” see this issue of Minnesota History.

The Lady

The Winona County Courthouse stands today as a testament to one of the earliest and longest disputes over historic preservation in the state of Minnesota.

More images from the courthouse in Winona County

"for some reason ... witnesses usually lose their vocal powers when they take the witness chair..."

So laments a district court judge familiar with courtroom behavior in Detroit Lakes, Becker County, in northwestern Minnesota. As plans for a new courthouse were being prepared in early 1941, this judge offered his advice on seating arrangements that would allow the jurors to hear “all the evidence” especially when the lawyers and the witnesses “carry on a little conversation back and forth which is scarcely audible to the judge and wholly inaudible to the jurors who should hear it all.” He included a little pencil drawing of the courtroom to show how he thought the parties should all be seated.

Aside from this entertaining story of a judge’s attempt to shape the courtroom design (surely an acceptable form of influence), what I really love about this 1942 building is the massive black granite eagle guarding the front entrance to the building. Designed in the stylized (and, in this case, quite militaristic) vernacular of the Art Deco era, the figure displays an impressive strength but “whether as a reminder of the federal presence or as a symbol of authority is speculation,” according to documents from the Becker County Museum.

Foss & Co., a design and architecture firm that had won the contract to build the courthouse, has a rendering of the eagle but no information about its sculptor. The 2.5-ton life-size figure may have been designed by the lead architect at the time, Magnus O. Foss, Sr. although, intriguingly, a nearly exact model carved from a block of light-colored Vermont marble, had been created a decade earlier and installed on a courthouse in Albany, NY. Could the same artist have designed and carved both eagles? Had Mr. Foss seen the building in Albany? Even more curiously, the sculptor of the New York eagle, Albert T. Stewart, had worked with Minnesota native Paul Manship who is famously known as the sculptor of the Prometheus statue that overlooks skaters at Rockefeller Center. And there’s more, Mr Stewart created the reliefs on the bronze elevator doors that adorn the 1932 Ramsey County Courthouse in St. Paul. What kind of a rabbit hole have I fallen into?

At any rate, without FDR’s Works Progress Administration funds, to the tune of a $100,000 grant, the county may not have been able to afford the new courthouse. Luckily, a local election to approve an additional $150,000 that was needed to complete the project was approved in 1941.

Many thanks to Adam Peterson, a principal at Foss Architecture and Interiors who generously sent me what his firm has in their archives and my friend, Kate Nearpass Ogden who, as an art historian, has a network of art and architecture geeks who indulged my amateur detective work on this small town (read: flyover) civic gem.

Building in wartime

The 1942 Becker County Courthouse replaced a 1884 building that sagged, bulged, leaked, and was dangerously unstable.

More photographs of the Becker County Courthouse

"... [the] residents of Herman rigged an election and made off with the court records..."

These comments come from a Herman, Minnesota resident in 2011 when she nominated the Grant County Courthouse in Elbow Lake for recognition in MPR’s Celebrating Minnesota Architecture Series. I guess the woman’s temporal distance from the fraudulent event of the late 19th century allowed her to appreciate the beauty of the courthouse in spite of her residency in the wayward town.

The election for county seat, held in 1881, was acrimonious and civic leaders from Herman did indeed raid the county offices in Elbow Lake and cart off county records and iron safes. The election was eventually declared null and void when investigators discovered a sizable number of votes had not been counted in several townships and, in one, more votes were cast than there were eligible voters. It seemed temporary workers brought in from Anoka county had cast ballots before returning home and several minors as well as non-citizens (most immigrants at the time were from either Scandinavia or Germany) had also voted in one jurisdiction. Elbow Lake, barely a crossroads of buildings but conveniently located in the center of the county, received the nod to establish itself as the locus of county government.

Today the Grant county courthouse stands as one of the most beautiful interiors of the 89 county courthouses in Minnesota that I visited. Not that I can claim to have seen all of them. When I started this photography project it was the first year of the pandemic and I only took photos of the exterior of the buildings. But once I was able to get into more places, this courthouse in Grant County, built in 1905, immediately stood out. It’s not a large courthouse (the entire county numbered only about 9,000 residents at the 1900 census) but the people of the county wanted something outstanding to represent them and their, mostly, law-abiding population. The jewel in the crown is the rotunda dome with murals depicting agricultural scenes from this rural northwestern corner of the state.

Odin Oyen, a Norwegian immigrant who established a design firm in LaCrosse, Wisconsin after graduating from the Art Institute in Chicago, decorated the building with those stunning murals and other details that have been restored recently in keeping with the design esthetic of the time.

[Note from the photographer: Although I anticipated publishing this account earlier in the year, the current political turmoil targeting immigrants in our Minnesota communities has made it difficult to concentrate. Readers may be ready for a minor distraction at this point and a story that involves proven voter fraud hits home in a way that seems quaint, if a little raw, some 145 years later.]

 
Murals on the dome of the Grant County (Minnesota) courthouse

The courthouse dome

Odin Oyen was paid $3000 to paint the murals and provide the courthouse’s interior decoration.

More images from the courthouse in Grant county

"... in view of the present depression that is sweeping the country..."

One of my favorite county courthouses of the eighty-nine I have visited and photographed is located in the southern Minnesota county seat of Faribault. One reason is the Art Deco architecture, that sleek, Moderne design we see so often in the slapstick comedies of the 1930s, in the Manhattan apartments with their tenants dressed in slinky dresses and crisp dinner jackets smoking cigarettes from pencil-thin holders. This is the bureaucratic version, a rebellion against the towers and gingerbread and oversized stonework and Greek columns of previous architectural eras.

And this particular courthouse, commissioned in 1931 following a fire that destroyed the original courthouse, speaks to the constraints and concerns of the time. The United States was in the middle of the Great Depression when between a quarter and a third of Minnesota’s workforce was unemployed. The Minnesota Historical Society has a letter from the Chairman of the Central Labor Committee to the Board of County Commissioners of Rice County describing a resolution passed by representatives of the carpenters’, painters’, plumbers’, and barbers’ (why barbers?) unions. The resolution requested, respectfully, that all laborers work not more than 8 hours a day for a minimum of $.45 per hour and that all labor and materials for the reconstruction of the courthouse come from Rice County, as fas as was possible. You could say a “Rice County First” policy to get the economy back on track.

Art Deco Beauty

The cornerstone of the Rice County Courthouse was laid on December 21, 1932 following a fire that destroyed the original 1874 building. Note the sundial over the central bank of windows - the only courthouse in the state to mark time by the sun.