A Tourism Guidebook and Travel Guide
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Adams County Courthouse
First Courthouse
Adams County officials contracted to construct the first courthouse in May 1839. The contract stipulated that the courthouse would be,
"...shall be a framed house built of good material, thirty by forty feet in size and two stories high; the lower story or room to be left without any partitions, and the upper story or room divided into rooms to accommodate the grand and petit juries...The weather boarding on the
two sides next to the streets shall be planed." This building served as courthouse until 1873, when it was sold and moved to another site on Front Street in Decatur.
Current Courthouse
By 1870 the courthouse was no longer sufficient to fit the needs of the county, thus Adams County officials began discussing building a new structure. The county commissioners appointed a committee composed of four men to visit various buildings in other counties to determine the style of the new courthouse. The committee members performed as requested and filed a report on February 8,1872, recommending Second Empire-style structure based upon the design of the Defiance Court House in Defiance, Ohio. The commissioners agreed with this recommendation and their proposal to contract with architect J. C. Johnson to design the building. Later that year contracts were signed with the target date of December 1, 1873, for the building to be completed. Construction did not complete on that date; but was on January 29, 1874. The National Register of Historic Places listed the Adams County Courthouse on August 6, 2008.
The Indiana General Assembly created Adams County on February 12, 1821, naming it for John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States. Settlers began arriving in the area from New England around 1835. Most were descended from New England Puritan ancestors and were drawn to the cheap land and the final expulsion of the native tribes at the end of the Black Hawk War drew. Many came via the newly completed Erie Canal. When these settlers arrived, prairie and virgin forests still covered the northeast Indiana landscape.
Erie Canal
Begun in 1817, construction on the main canal ended in 1825 and the canal opened for business on October 26, 1825. The canal ran from a connection with the Hudson River at Albany New York to a connection with Lake Erie in Buffalo, New York. The canal connected the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and reduced the cost of transportation.
Black Hawk War
The 1832 Black Hawk War Black Hawk War ended at the Battle of Bad Ax on August 2, 1832. William Henry Harrison had negotiated a treaty in St. Louis in 1804 that the Sauk tribe disputed. Claiming that the Americans claimed more land than the treaty intended, a Sauk band under the leadership of Black Hawk entered Illinois to reclaim ancestral territory. The dispute became a war, which Black Hawk's band lost at the Battle of Bad Axe. After the war, President Andrew Jackson persuaded the remaining Amerindian tribes that remained east of the Mississippi River to sell their lands and move west of the Mississippi. Most remaining tribes in Indiana were forced out of the state in the mid 1830's.
John Quincy Adams (July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848)
The son of the second President of the United States, John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams, John was native to Braintree, Massachusetts. He never attended school, instead tutored by a cousin, James Thax and Nathan Rice, his father's law clerk. When Adams learned of the Declaration of Independence at age eleven, he began keeping a journal. He added to this journal until he died in 1848. The fifty-volume journal is an important source of information about the early republic for historians and scholars. Adams served in the United States House of Representatives, United States Senate, and the first minister to Russia, Secretary of State and President of the United States. Adams negotiated treaties that ended the War of 1812 and acquired Florida from Spain. He also drafted the Monroe Doctrine for President James Monroe in 1823.