The Art Deco courthouse with a chief on the lobby floor

Walk into the Gladwin County Courthouse at 401 West Cedar Avenue and look down: there’s a Native American chief worked right into the lobby floor. Look up in the courtroom and you’ll find Lady Justice carved in an octagonal relief above the judge’s bench. For a small-county building in the middle of the Lower Peninsula, it has more design ambition than you’d expect — which makes sense once you know it went up at the tail end of the 1930s, when Art Deco was the look of the moment.

The county built it in 1939 and 1940 for about $82,000, a buff-colored brick-and-concrete box with the clean lines and balanced, blocky symmetry of the style. A Royal Oak architect, Frederick D. Madison, drew the plans. A southern addition followed in the 1970s, but the original Deco core still reads clearly from the street.

It replaced an older three-story brick courthouse from the late 1870s, which was torn down in 1941 once the new one was finished. And that one had replaced the roughest arrangement of all: when the county was first organized, officials are said to have met in a barn before Gladwin became the county seat in 1875. So the building you see today is the third act — the county trading up from a barn, to a brick box, to a courthouse confident enough to put a chief on the floor and Justice over the bench.

It’s still the working seat of county government, the circuit and district courts, the clerk, the offices where deeds and marriages and lawsuits get filed. Most people come for a license plate tab or jury duty and never glance down. Next time, glance down.