The county's first jail was an adapted stone store building of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. The fire of 1849 destroyed the first courthouse, and the following year a new building in the classical style was begun and was finished in 1852. The inadequacies of the jail led to the commissioning of Edward Haviland, the post–Civil War jail expert in the state. For Mauch Chunk, he sketched a cubic front block with a rear skylighted cellblock on the order of Napoleon LeBrun's prisons at Norristown (MO22) and nearby Pottsville (SC17). In its yard, six of the militant miners tarred by the coal industry as Molly Maguires were executed after the show trial at Pottsville.