The story below is from our March/April 2020 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s designs, this historical structure is scheduled for more modern renovations.
A courthouse often is the center of a community, a place where the public and the law meet.
The Botetourt County Courthouse has been a Fincastle fixture for about 250 years.
But there have been four different versions of the courthouse at the corner of Main and Roanoke streets. It opened in the late 1700s as a log structure.
A second courthouse was built about 1820 using architectural designs by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson mailed the designs from Monticello to Gen. James Breckinridge, according to a historical account by author Robert Douthat Stoner.
The building had a domed top, columns made of walnut logs, stone floors and copper and tin pipes and gutters.
About 27 years later, a third version of the courthouse went up, with a courtroom that extended into the roof and was heated by a fireplace.
But on December 15, 1970, a fire gutted the structure. Surprisingly, the county’s historical records, locked in a courthouse vault, survived the flames. In 1975, the county built a new, fourth courthouse modeled after Jefferson’s designs. This is the one that stands today.
Now, changes are on the horizon. The building is in need of repairs. Renovations that likely will begin next year will include adding security features, making the space handicapped accessible, mold remediation and more, says Gary Larrowe, Botetourt County administrator.
“It has outlived its usefulness,” he says.
Also, the county is moving most of its administrative offices out of the courthouse and other Fincastle buildings and into the Greenfield Education and Training Center in Daleville, a permanent relocation.
Offices for the judge, clerk of court and commonwealth attorney will relocate temporarily from the courthouse to the county’s former district court building in Fincastle during renovations, Larrowe says. The refurbished county landmark likely will re-open by mid-2022, he says.
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