The courthouse that looks like a Tudor manor — and its glowing murals

Walk up to the Midland County Courthouse expecting columns and a dome, and you get a steep-roofed brick manor instead — half-timbered gables, leaded windows, the look of an English country house that wandered into downtown. It is the only Tudor Revival county courthouse in Michigan, and the Detroit architect Bloodgood Tuttle built it that way on purpose, to feel less like a government fortress and more like a home.

The strangest part is on the walls. Large murals by the Detroit artist Paul Honoré wrap around the outside, and they faintly glisten in the right light because of what they are made of. The medium is a magnesite stucco shot through with bits of colored glass. Honoré troweled it on with a palette knife, in thick glassy slabs. And the material itself was worked out in the laboratories of the Dow Chemical Company, right here in town. A century later it still holds its color outdoors.

Read left to right, the murals tell Midland’s story in order: the Native people who were here first, white settlement, the lumber era, farming, and finally Herbert Dow and the chemical industry that made the town. It was novel enough that Popular Mechanics ran a piece on it back in March 1926, the same year the building opened. The murals were carefully restored in the mid-2000s.

Locals call it one of the most photographed courthouses in the state, and on a bright afternoon you can see why. The brick, the timbered peaks, and those faintly shimmering walls turned a chemical company’s lab experiment into public art. And you can walk right up and touch it.