History

By the late 1920s, Jefferson County’s existing courthouse had become inadequate for a county whose largest city, Birmingham, was one of the fastest-growing industrial centers in the American South. The county commissioned Holabird and Root—the Chicago firm that was then transforming the American courthouse and civic building with their confident Art Deco modernism—to design a new structure that would announce Jefferson County’s ambitions. The cornerstone was laid in 1929, and the completed building opened in 1932, just as the Depression was deepening.

The choice of Leo Friedlander for the exterior bas reliefs was significant. Friedlander was among the most in-demand sculptors of the Art Deco period, later contributing to Rockefeller Center; his panels for the Jefferson County Courthouse depicted the farming, mining, and industrial heritage of the region in the stylized, geometric vocabulary of the movement. The previous courthouse, which had stood since the late nineteenth century, was demolished in 1937 once the new building had proven its permanence.

The building’s longevity as an active courthouse owes something to a 1963–64 International Style limestone annex that absorbed expanded court functions without displacing the original structure. The annex dressed in the same limestone as its predecessor—a deliberate material continuity that allowed the two buildings to coexist without obvious clash in Linn Park, the civic plaza they share with Birmingham City Hall and the Birmingham Museum of Art.