Historic building seeks facelift

Adams County Courthouse to undergo slight changes in the upcoming years

Adams County authorities are seeking to give its most important building a decade-long facelift.

A series of repairs, priced at about $46,800, are designed to bring a more homogeneous look to the insides of the Adams County Courthouse.

These changes, under the guidance of interior designer Jeanne Cichanski of Manson, Wash., include repairing the roof, the wrinkled carpeting in the courtrooms, finishing the paint jobs on the offices, and changing the decals and signs to a design more befitting a 63-year-old building.

"We are hoping to clean up its look and give (the building) a theme," said O'Brien, who added that Cichanski had been hired to lay out a 10-year master plan to list all elements that need to be updated or replaced, without altering the historical significance of the building.

O'Brien said the decals are 1980s style, which clashes with some of the decor, which includes a brass inscription of the Gettysburg Address.

Some of the changes will be of a more practical nature, given the need to bring the building up to Americans With Disabilities Act standards.

"We need to have the signage in braille," he said.

All these changes, O'Brien said, hinge on the outcome of the county's tight annual budgets.

The money for these changes will come out of the capital improvement fund for facilities of the county. This fund, whose uses are exclusive for changes of this kind, gathers one-quarter of one percent of the local real estate excise tax.

The building was added in 2003 to the Ritzville Register of Historic Places, because of its significance to the city and the county rather than his architectural value.

Inhabitants of the courthouse such as Prosecutor's Office assistant Ann Olson explain that while the building is not necessarily unique or architecturally rich, it is important to the community today and in the past. The last two courthouse buildings were built on that same spot.

The first courthouse building was a wood-frame construction purchased in 1885, where Olson's grandfather, the county sheriff at the time, lived with his wife in one of the floors where she cooked all the meals to feed the county jail's inmates.

As the population grew with settlers flowing in from the Midwest, the county grew, and that is how the second courthouse, a bigger, more stately building, was built on the same spot the current courthouse is. This building, circa 1892, was destroyed by a fire 13 years later.

The third courthouse was built in 1905 and it lasted until 1941, when the current building was constructed. During the past 60 years, several remodels or additions have taken place, the last big one in 1984, when the current county jail was added.