The Old Custom House is a historic government building in downtown

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...

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 ...

. Built from 1869 to 1872, the building served as a

customs house A custom house or customs house was traditionally a building housing the offices for a jurisdictional government whose officials oversaw the functions associated with importing and exporting goods into and out of a country, such as collecting c ...

post office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...

, and

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 ...

Alfred B. Mullett Alfred Bult Mullett (April 7, 1834 – October 20, 1890) was a British-American architect who served from 1866 to 1874 as Office of the Supervising Architect, Supervising Architect, head of the government agency, agency of the United States Treas ...

, the U.S.

Supervising Architect The Office of the Supervising Architect was an agency of the United States Treasury Department that designed federal government buildings from 1852 to 1939. The office handled some of the most important architectural commissions of the nineteenth ...

at the time, designed the building in the

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian R ...

style, a rarity among federal buildings; his design features a

bracket A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

and rounded windows. When Cairo built a new post office in 1942, the building became the town's police station. The building is one of the few surviving U.S. custom houses and one of the largest federal buildings of its era in the Mid-Mississippi Valley region. The custom house was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

on July 24, 1973. It now serves as a history museum. In celebration of the 2018 Illinois Bicentennial, Cairo Custom House was selected as one of the Illinois 200 Great Places by the

American Institute of Architects The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization for architects in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach to su ...

Illinois component (AIA Illinois).

References

External links

Cairo Custom HouseIllinois Great Places

Cairo Custom HouseSociety of Architectural Historians SAH ARCHIPEDIA entry on Cairo Custom House
Government buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois Italianate architecture in Illinois Government buildings completed in 1872 Museums in Alexander County, Illinois History museums in Illinois Cairo, Illinois National Register of Historic Places in Alexander County, Illinois 1872 establishments in Illinois {{Illinois-museum-stub