Three iterations of the N. W. Overstreet office are represented in this town: the courthouse executed when A. Hays Town was an employee but not yet a partner, and the firm’s work was traditional; the jail (NE3) done in 1938, the year Town left the partnership at the end of a decade when modern and Moderne ideas were imaginatively combined; and the Tippah Electric Power Association building (NE4) built in 1955 when Overstreet’s latest partners had moved the firm’s design to an American interpretation of European modernism.
When the state legislature created Tippah County in 1836, Ripley was platted as the county seat, and a square was reserved for the courthouse. The present Mediterranean-influenced two-story, red brick courthouse, the fourth on the site, has a hipped-roofed central section with quoins, set between plain, flat-roofed wings, and features triple-arched entrances front and back leading to loggias with pedimented doorways. Astride the central entrance arches, World War I doughboy figures stand on cast-stone columns with garland capitals.