The Hamilton County Courthouse is a government building in McLeansboro, the

county seat A county seat is an administrative center, seat of government, or capital city of a county or civil parish. The term is in use in Canada, China, Hungary, Romania, Taiwan, and the United States. The equivalent term shire town is used in the US st ...

of Hamilton County,

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. Built in 1938, more than forty years after the destruction of the previous

courthouse A courthouse or court house is a building that is home to a local court of law and often the regional county government as well, although this is not the case in some larger cities. The term is common in North America. In most other English-spe ...

in McLeansboro, it is the third such building to serve the county. Land was first registered in Hamilton County in 1815,''History of Gallatin, Saline, Hamilton, Franklin, and Williamson counties, Illinois: from the earliest time to the present, together with sundry and interesting biographical sketches, notes, reminiscences, etc., etc.''

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

: Goodspeed, 1887. and the law establishing the county was enacted in early 1821. Local officials soon began working to choose a location as the county seat, and they ultimately approved a piece of land donated by one William McLean, for whom the future city was named. Here was built an early courthouse, a log cabin completed by mid-1821. This building remained in use until the completion of a brick replacement in 1840; it remained in use until an 1894 fire. For nearly half a century, the county operated without a courthouse: the public square housed a combined records office and jail, but most county business was accomplished in nearby rented buildings. A weak attempt at building a courthouse saw minimal success, so the advent of the Great Depression saw Hamilton County still functioning without a courthouse. This state of affairs concluded in 1938, when the

Public Works Administration The Public Works Administration (PWA), part of the New Deal of 1933, was a large-scale public works construction agency in the United States headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. It was created by the National Industrial Recove ...

erected the present

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

brick building. Entrances are placed in the center of each side, flanked by three or four windows on either left or right.Weiser, Dennis. ''Illinois courthouses: an illustrated history''.

Virginia Beach Virginia Beach is an independent city located on the southeastern coast of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. The population was 459,470 at the 2020 census. Although mostly suburban in character, it is the most populous city ...

: Donning, 2009, 57.

References

External links

Hamilton County website
{{coord, 38, 5, 37, N, 88, 32, 9, W, display=title Government buildings completed in 1938 Art Deco architecture in Illinois Brick buildings and structures Buildings and structures in Hamilton County, Illinois County courthouses in Illinois Public Works Administration in Illinois