Licking County Courthouse

Built of dressed and rock-faced limestone between 1876 and 1878, the Licking County Courthouse occupies Courthouse Square in Newark, Ohio. The roughly seventy-five-foot-square building rests on a sandstone foundation and was designed by architect H. E. Myer, with Miller, Frazier and Sheets of Mansfield as major contractor. The county authorized construction at a cost of $148,000 when its earlier courthouse no longer met the needs of a growing county. Each side has a pedimented, projecting central bay topped by a statue of Justice, though the statues have lost their scales. A mansard roof carries an ornate clock tower with louvered round-headed arches and an iron balustrade. First-floor windows have Tudor-arched frames, and second-floor windows have leaded circular insets under semi-elliptical arches. Described as massive yet well proportioned, the building is considered an excellent late-Victorian courthouse with well-preserved Second Empire features. Historian Henry Howe praised the courthouse square as the most beautiful of its kind in Ohio. The building has remained the county courthouse ever since.