Joseph E. Mills and Sons of Detroit provided the city with two Beaux-Arts public buildings: the county courthouse and the city hall. The limestone-sheathed courthouse conveys more of a late nineteenth-century version of the classical tradition rather than that of the twentieth century. The volumes of the building read vertically, as does the fenestration; there is little in the way of solid walls to play against the opening. The central open tower complex, topped by a clock dome with dormers, also projects a pre-1900 atmosphere. The strongest purely classical element is the pedimented entrance, supported by two pairs of Corinthian columns. The 1909–1910 courthouse replaced a remarkable 1867 building that centered attention on a high drum, a hatlike dome, and, high atop the dome, a standing figure.
On the courthouse grounds is an 1875 stone Civil War memorial consisting of a soldier atop a column which in turn is set on a high base. Interestingly, the top of the base has four pediments with semi-circular dormers remarkably similar to the dome of the courthouse, built some 35 years later.