302 South Railroad Avenue
City Directories and History: Calhoun County Courthouse was built in 1913 and designed by renowned South Carolina architect William Augustus Edwards. The courthouse is a two-story brick, Georgian Revival building with a colossal Doric portico on the south elevation. The tetrastyle portico projects from a central three-bay entrance pavilion. The columns of the portico are of stuccoed brick with the proportion and detail of the Greek Doric order: no bases, the diameter broad in relation to the height, and annulets on the lower part of each capital echinus. The entablatures of the portico are executed in wood. It consists of a bipartite architrave, followed by a
Images courtesy of photographer Bill Segars – 2007
Doric frieze, with alternating triglyphs and metopes. A taenia beneath the triglyphs features wooden guttae. The courthouse has a hipped roof. A cupola at the crest of the roof is octagonal, painted white, with open arcaded sides, an entablature, and an octagonal dome of pointed profile, sheathed in metal and crowned with a wind vane. The cross-axis plan courthouse was built to serve the newly formed Calhoun County, named for South Carolina Statesman John C. Calhoun. The county seat of St. Matthews donated $20,000 toward construction costs for the courthouse and two prominent local residents donated the construction site. Interior details are restricted to the courtroom, where they are used to reinforce the authority of the judge, as representative of Law, Order, Justice, and Calhoun County. Listed in the National Register October 30, 1981.
(Courtesy of South Carolina Department of Archives and History)
Click here for the National Register site.
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