How St. Louis has built and rebuilt its historic courthouse over decades

After the Old Courthouse reopened this month following a multimillion-dollar renovation, it’s worth noting that St. Louis had even older courthouses. In fact, at one point, the Gateway City was growing so quickly that they were being built and rebuilt every decade or so. By the 1820s, St. Louisans commissioned Joseph C. Laveille and George Morton (of Old Cathedral fame) to design the city’s first courthouse, a simple Palladian neoclassical structure with a small cupola on top. Auguste Chouteau and Jean Baptiste Charles Lucas donated the land for the courthouse to encourage action in their new real estate development west of the original town of St. Louis. That little courthouse—in use by 1828 but not declared officially complete until 1835—was already too small by 1838, when a competition was announced to dramatically expand it. This time Henry Singleton was the architect, and his design called for a dome surmounting a vastly expanded Greek Revival courthouse to the west of its predecessor. Further expansions in the 1850s by Robert Mitchell saw the demise of Laveille and Morton’s original courthouse, until William Rumbold’s revolutionary 1861 cast-iron dome finally gave us the iconic profile that’s still recognizable today.