The Missaukee courthouse that burned in a February night

On February 17, 1944, Lake City lost its courthouse to fire. The building that burned had stood since 1882 — a two-story frame structure designed by George Nelson and put up by contractor John G. Mosser for a little over $10,000, with a front tower that nodded to the fashionable styles of the day. It had held the county’s business for sixty-two years before the flames took it in a winter night.

A courthouse fire is a particular kind of loss in a small county. The deeds, the marriage records, the court files — much of a community’s paper memory sits in one building, and when it goes, genealogists and title clerks feel it for generations. After the fire, county officials simply moved into a two-story brick house at 325 South Canal Street and kept working while they figured out what to do next.

It took a while. The replacement wasn’t built until 1953 through 1955, a $162,000 building designed by Gordon Cornwall of Traverse City, with John Saul of the same city as contractor. What went up is plain and solid in the postwar manner — two stories of buff-colored brick facing west, a white concrete portico over the door, sitting on landscaped grounds right in the middle of town. A jail was attached not long after, and the building was expanded again in 1981 and 2002.

It’s not a grand Victorian pile like the courthouses some Michigan counties still show off. It’s the building a county puts up when it has had a hard lesson about fire and decides, this time, to make the thing out of brick and concrete and not take any chances.