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Saturday, November 27, 2004
Indiana Courts - Noble County Courthouse restored
"Courthouse recaptures its dignity: Noble landmark renovated" is the headline to this story today in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Some quotes:
With the third-floor courtrooms virtually complete, the focus has now shifted to the offices of the second floor and the details on the walls, including hanging black-and-white historical photographs of the courthouse and corresponding historic happenings.Photographs depict the infamous “Slide for Life” in 1908, in which an Ohio woman slid on an 800-foot-long wire from the Courthouse bell tower into an alley, and a 1909 stunt at the Albion Street Fair, in which a man dived from a 90-foot-high ladder into a large barrel of water.
“It just adds a lot to the life of the building,” Laur said, zooming in to details in the pictures, displayed on his computer. “So that people can get some feel for their heritage, it’s important that this building reflect not just today.”
Many of the photos, which were hung last week in the jewel-toned decor of the Courthouse, were lent from the Old Jail Museum in Albion. So are the judge and witness chairs in the Circuit Court room.
The original wooden jury chairs in the courtroom were refinished after stripping off a 1950s veneer and given new leather seats, and new attorneys’ chairs were modeled after the jury chairs.
The bailiff’s desk was taken back from the Superior Court room, where it had functioned as the judge’s bench.
“We just scoured,” Laur said. “It was just sort of a collective effort to find all the pieces that were left.”
County officials even traveled to Bryan, Ohio, which is home to a cousin courthouse designed by the same architect and built two years later, to learn more about that county’s courthouse.
Noble County Historian Bob Gagen, who also serves as secretary of the Noble County Historical Society, visited Bryan and is pleased with the Noble restoration.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 27, 2004 07:50 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts