You can see the Mason courthouse dome from the farm fields

Drive toward Mason across the flat farm country south of Lansing and you’ll spot the courthouse before you reach the town — a tall, square clock tower rising over the fields, visible for miles. That’s the point. When Ingham County built it, the building was meant to announce the county seat from a long way off.

The courthouse went up between 1902 and 1904, the county’s third, on the block just north of where the first one had stood. The architect was Edwyn A. Bowd of Lansing, a name that turns up on a lot of mid-Michigan public buildings, and he worked in the Beaux Arts style — the formal, symmetrical look of grand civic architecture from that era, all balanced wings and classical detail topped by that domed tower.

By the late 1900s the building was tired. The county started a restoration study in 1980 and then spent the next fifteen years bringing the place back, finishing the decorative work in the public spaces in 1995. The group steering that work, the county’s Commission on History, is the oldest county history commission in the state — which tells you something about how seriously Mason takes the building.

There’s a famous wrinkle in why the courthouse is here at all. Mason is the county seat, but Lansing — the state capital, twelve miles north — sits in the same county. That makes Ingham the only county in the country where the state capital is not in the county seat. So the grandest building in little Mason isn’t the capitol up the road; it’s this Beaux Arts courthouse, holding its ground over the farmland, dome and all.