A Claire Allen courthouse on the square

Corunna may be one of Michigan’s smaller county seats, but it has a grand courthouse to match any of them. The Shiawassee County Courthouse, built in 1903 and 1904 on the public square in the middle of town, is a stately Classical Revival building of limestone, with a tall columned portico and an elegant clock tower. Inside, a stained-glass dome is ringed with twelve painted figures representing the signs of the zodiac. It was designed by Claire Allen, a Jackson architect who was Michigan’s go-to courthouse designer around the turn of the last century — the same man who designed the courthouse over in Ithaca, in neighboring Gratiot County. More than a century later it’s still the working seat of county government, carefully restored to keep its original look.