User:Kbh3rd/Courthouses
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This page heps organize a personal project for collecting and rating quality photographs of the courthouses of Missouri counties for use in Wikpedia and other Wikimedia projects. Many of Missouri's county courthouses date from the mid-to-late 1800s to the early 1900s and exhibit interesting, sometimes historically significant architecture. Many are on the National Register of Historic Places.
The county courthouse is the locus of county government in most counties. Originally a courthouse may have housed all of the offices of county government in addition to courts. Even after other government functions expand into other detached facilities the county courthouse may remain the most distinctive and tangible symbol of the functions of the county.
Many counties have outgrown their historic courthouses and have responded varying ways. The old building may have been expanded by an addition being built onto it; parts of the county government may have been moved into one or more newer buildings while the old courthouse is continued to be used, either for courts or for other county offices; some historic courthouses may have been turned into museums after they are no longer used by the government; while others, perhaps being too expensive to maintain for that or any other purpose, have been razed.
In extreme cases, such as St. Louis County and Jackson County, the county government facilities may constitute a large campus, and the courts themselves may operate in several dispersed facilities, further eroding the concept of the county courthouse embodying the government of the county.
At the other extreme, one wonders how the shrinking populations of some rural counties will be able to continue to fund the functions of a county government and the facilities to house it.
Note that this is not in the main article space and that the above consists of unsourced personal observation.
The Missouri State Archives has a video of a talk by Dennis Weiser, author of Missouri Courthouses: Building Memories on the Square (ISBN 978-1578643998).