At first glance the Snyder County courthouse bears a family resemblance to Classical Revival brick courthouses in Perry (
PE7), Juniata (
JU5), and Montour (
MT1) counties built in the nineteenth-century, but it is actually a clever twentieth-century reproduction. Middleburg native Stetler, architect of the county's 1886 Romanesque Revival prison on Main Street and Willow Avenue, replaced a vernacular gable-fronted Italianate building with an academic variation on the regional courthouse style in 1915. Above two arched doorways on the rusticated ground level, he placed an Ionic pavilion with a balustrade and a roofline pediment trimmed with prominent dentils. Crowned by a louvered belfry and clock tower, the new courthouse had an unmistakably civic identity. In 1977, L. Robert Kimball and Associates seamlessly connected a three-story brick ell to the courthouse by a continuation of Stetler's wide dentiled cornice.