The biggest building ever made of Ionia sandstone

For a while, Ionia had its own stone. Quarries around the city cut a warm reddish-brown sandstone that builders shipped out by the railcar, and the grandest thing they ever made of it is still standing in the middle of town: the county courthouse, the largest structure ever built from Ionia sandstone. The lowest floor is a paler Ohio sandstone, but everything above it is the local stuff, and the whole 120-by-80-foot pile rises three and a half stories to a four-stage domed cupola with a statue of Justice on top, watching over Main Street.

It did not come easily. Ground was broken in 1883 to a design by the Toledo architect David W. Gibbs, but the original builder went bankrupt in 1885, and the county’s building committee had to see the job over the line itself. The courthouse was finished in 1886, and it went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

The inside is where the sandstone budget stops being the point. There are black-and-white marble floors, oak wainscoting, and a heavy walnut-and-butternut staircase climbing up through the center of the building, plus more than a dozen marble fireplaces tucked into the offices. It anchors a downtown that kept its old bones — the 1908 city hall, the 1912 post office, the 1931 Ionia Theatre all within a few blocks — but the courthouse is the one that announces, in stone quarried a mile away, that this small town once expected to matter.