{"nrhp_refnum":"74001470","name":"Erie County Office Building","other_names":["Erie County Children's Home"],"category":"building","location":{"address":"1202 Sycamore Line","address_restricted":false,"city":"Sandusky","county":"Erie County","state":"OH","lat":41.44761054700007,"lon":-82.69717978699998,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1974-11-20","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Architecture","Social History"],"significance_levels":["local"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A four-story limestone institutional building with flanking two-and-a-half story wings at 1202 Sycamore Line, Sandusky, Erie County, Ohio, begun in 1899 as the Erie County Children's Home and now used as a county office building.","why_significant":"The nomination presents it as a good representative of late nineteenth century institutional building and an excellent example of eclectic architecture in the Neo-Colonial (Georgian Revival) mode. It is unusual for being built of native Sandusky limestone. It also records the county's permanent children's home and its later welfare work.","narrative":"Built from 1899 as the Erie County Children's Home, this four-story building on Sycamore Line in Sandusky is made of gray cut limestone quarried locally. The central block has a five-bay facade, a gambrel roof, dormer windows, a classical entrance porch and a Palladian-type window in the gambrel end. Symmetrical wings with low hipped roofs carry balustrades and dormers with stepped chimneys. A rear wing added in 1902 gave the building a T-shaped plan and housed a hospital and boiler room. Erie County voters approved the home in the 1898 election, and it was erected on a five-acre tract. From 1900 to 1916 it housed an average of eighteen boys and seventeen girls a year. A welfare agency was added in 1915 to locate orphaned or abandoned children, support families and oversee foster homes. The children's home left in 1960, and the county has used the building for offices since the early 1960s. Only the main building is included, not the other home buildings on the site.","period_of_significance":"1899 (19th and 20th Century boxes checked)","architect_builder":null,"architectural_style":"Neo-Colonial / Neo-Classical mode of the Georgian Revival style","criteria":[],"status_note":"Condition rated excellent and altered; occupied and in government use as county offices since the early 1960s. The children's home left the building in 1960.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:53:10.325306-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_OH/74001470.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/74001470/31d3197466-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/74001470/31d3197466-1600.webp","licence":"Public domain","author":"Nyttend","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Erie_County_Office_Building_in_Sandusky.jpg\" rel=\"noopener\">Nyttend</a>, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Erie_County_Office_Building_in_Sandusky.jpg"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71988154","wikipedia":null,"wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q137770924"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/ohio/erie-county/erie-county-office-building-74001470/"}