Researcher traverses Indiana to photograph its historic courthouses
The Putnam County courthouse in Greencastle, Ind.,
features a Second World War V1 ‘Flying Bomb’
on the courthouse’s front lawn as a war memorial.
Image from Chris Flook.
See the whole project.
A telecommunications instructor at Ball State University drove through the state of Indiana this summer with one goal in mind: to visit every county to study and photograph courthouse squares.
Chris Flook’s photos and historical courthouse information are online at IndianaCourthouseSquare.org, the Post-Tribune reports. More than 80 communities in the state’s 92 counties have historic courthouses, many of them built in the 1800s when the courthouse was the community focal point, the story says.
“I like the idyllic idea of town squares,” Flook told the Post-Tribune. “But it’s relatively rare to have the courthouse at the center of town squares in the United States. Only a few regions and states have this.”
The courthouse square website says public courthouse squares were also a regular feature in Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas.
The historical information will be used for Indiana’s 2016 bicentennial.
