The yellow sandstone courthouse with faces in the stone

Look up at the arcade on the Hillsdale County Courthouse and faces look back. Carved into the stone capitals along the front porch are human heads and lions — the kind of detail a stonecutter slipped in when a building was meant to last a few centuries, not a few decades.

The county had bounced its seat around before this. Hillsdale County split off in 1829, and the courthouse moved from Jonesville to the city of Hillsdale in 1843. By the 1890s the old building was past its prime. Voters approved $45,000 for a new one in 1898, and the county hired Claire Allen, a Jackson architect who designed courthouses all over southern Michigan. His Hillsdale building went up over 1898 and 1899 and was dedicated on September 6, 1899.

Allen built it from local yellow sandstone — a warm honey-brown that glows in afternoon light — three stories under a copper-roofed cupola, with a pedimented entrance and an oak-paneled rotunda inside. A clock went into the tower in 1909 and has kept the town’s time since, refurbished now and then but still up there ticking.

The building earned a Michigan State Historic Site designation in 1969 and a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It still does its original job — court is in session, the clerk’s office is open, people pay taxes and pull marriage licenses under that same dome. Most county courthouses this old got torn down for something cheaper. Hillsdale kept the one with faces in the walls.