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.
