The Milwaukee architect of the Montgomery Courthouse, Henry C. Koch (a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects), designed courthouses in Kansas, Iowa, and Wisconsin. His 1890–1891 building replaced a modest 1857 two-story wooden building that had been moved in 1866 to Red Oak from Frankfort, the first county seat. Koch provided the county with the then-fashionable Richardsonian Romanesque image, but his design strongly conveyed a High Victorian atmosphere. This was due to the verticality of the design and to the emphatic division of the building into two layers: the raised basement and the ground floor sheathed in light tan Missouri limestone, and then the area above in red pressed brick and terracotta. The seven-story clock tower at one corner is balanced at the other corner by a bay tower capped by a Queen Anne roof with a segmented dome. The roofscape is sprinkled with vertical projections: a central pencil-thin cupola, small towers, a tall ribbed chimney, and numerous finials. The Montgomery County Courthouse is one of Iowa's principal contributions to the design of the nineteenth-century American courthouses.