In 1905, Penn J. Krouse, practicing with Clarence L. Hutchisson, designed the three-story courthouse in a somewhat finicky Beaux-Arts classicism. In 1939, while partnering with L. L. Brasfield, he forcefully remodeled it in a more confident Moderne style. Only the ochre-colored, rusticated first-floor brick walls remain as external evidence of the

original building, with new brick, limestone, and terra-cotta on the second and third floors. Above the zigzag-patterned cornice, the flat-roofed, chamfered-corner concrete masses of the tiered jail rise up in place of the 1905 dome and cupola.

On the next block at 410 21st the former two-hundred-room Lamar Hotel (1927) now houses county government offices. The first three floors form an ashlar-limestone base from which the building rises eight stories in brick to a corbel-table cornice. The facade features diaper-pattern brickwork accented by blue terra-cotta inserts in the spandrels.