Old Boone County Courthouse (1889)
Boone County, Boone County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Old Boone County Courthouse 1889. There has been a courthouse on this site since 1799 and the present one is the third built on the site. Designed by the McDonald Brothers of Louisville, the Renaissance Revival style building was completed for about $20,000. The courthouse was originally featured a large clock tower, but it was too heavy for the building and was removed in 1898. Renowned Cincinnati architects Samual Hannaford & Sons designed the present cupola. A courthouse nearly identical to this one but built of sandstone was erected in Bandera, Texas, in 1890. Market placed in 2008.
Erected by Burlington Historic District
The Story
A courthouse has stood on this Boone County site since 1799, and this third building — a Renaissance Revival design by Louisville's McDonald Brothers — was completed in 1889 for about $20,000. Its original clock tower proved too heavy and was removed in 1898, replaced by a cupola designed by the noted Cincinnati firm of Samuel Hannaford & Sons.
Why it matters
County courthouses like this one anchored civic life in rural America and showcase the ambitious public architecture of the Gilded Age.
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Related people
- · McDonald Brothers
- · Samuel Hannaford & Sons
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Tanner's Station, 1789
Boone County, KY
Tanner's Station, founded in 1789, was the first settlement in Boone County, begun when the Baptist preacher Rev. John Tanner built a blockhouse on 2,000 acres he owned with John Taylor. Shawnees captured Tanner's nine-year-old son here and held him until he was grown. Tanner, who had preached in the Carolinas and Virginia before coming to Kentucky in 1781, later moved on to Missouri and died there around 1812; the town was renamed Petersburg in 1818.
Abraham Brower
North Bend, OH
The Ohio Valley into which Abraham Brower was born in 1822 was still a raw frontier, a patchwork of new river towns and cleared farmland spreading out from the Ohio River just a generation after the first American settlers pushed west of the Appalachians. North Bend, his corner of Hamilton County, sat on the river below Cincinnati and had already given the young nation a president in William Henry Harrison. A man who lived here from 1822 to 1911, as this memorial records, would have watched the valley transform from wilderness clearings into a settled landscape of farms, steamboats, and growing towns over the course of a long American century.
John Cleves Symmes
North Bend, OH
In the years after the Revolution, as settlers pushed into the Northwest Territory, Judge John Cleves Symmes secured a vast tract of land between the Great and Little Miami rivers — the Miami (or Symmes) Purchase — and laid out the village of North Bend along the Ohio. His household became entwined with the nation's future when his daughter Anna married William Henry Harrison, the frontier soldier and territorial governor who would go on to the presidency. Symmes died in the early 19th century and lies in the family plot he now shares with the Harrisons.
Big Bone Lick
Boone County, KY · est. 1938
Where a sulphur-and-salt spring seeped to the surface in the Ohio Valley, generations of Ice Age mammoths and mastodons came to lick the minerals — and many died and were preserved, leaving a boneyard that astonished the first Europeans to reach it in 1739. Through the mid-1700s the lick drew a parade of frontier travelers and salt-makers, and by the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson, fascinated by these 'incognitum' giants, dispatched William Clark to gather specimens here. Later collectors like geologist N. S. Shaler hauled away tusks eight to ten feet long, making this quiet Kentucky spring one of the birthplaces of American paleontology.