Nineteenth-century American county courthouse architecture
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Nineteenth-century American county courthouse architecture was used in buildings designed to house judicial and administrative functions in styles such as Federal, Neoclassical, Italianate, Second Empire, and Romanesque Revival, which were adapted to local building materials and styles to accommodate local needs.[1] Over the course of the nineteenth century, the typical American county courthouse became more specialized than its eighteenth century predecessor, featuring increased usage of interior passageways and multiple levels and stairwells to facilitate a greater level of formality to court proceedings than could often be achieved through earlier examples which were centered around a single room on the ground floor. The gradual replacement of courtroom fittings associated with the English common law with those associated with American adversarial statute law, along with the use of clock towers, statuary, turrets, domes, and other architectural features became increasingly central to the iconography of local American public life, which represented at once the ideal of equal and impartial justice before the law in criminal and civil disputes, as well as the more wealth based and paternalistic ideal of justice represented by such cases as probations of estates, recording of deeds and property boundaries, assessments of taxes, enforcements of debts, evictions, and transfers of slaves.[2]