In his uncle's house, Lewis finds an image of the New Zebedee County Courthouse reproduced on the top of a red tin candy box (The House with a Clock in its Walls, 16).
I found it odd that Bellairs introduced readers to Capharnaum County yet identified the building as the New Zebedee County Courthouse rather than the Capharnaum County Courthouse. Gotta love semantics.
What with so much of Lewis's New Zebedee influenced by Bellairs's Marshall, I suppose we should look at what stood in Calhoun County.
Citizens erected the county's first courthouse in Marshall (you know – the Marshall County Courthouse...) in 1837 on the Courthouse Square in the West End Park – now the site of the Brooks Memorial Fountain. The elements took their toll too quickly on the building, and it soon became an eyesore. It was demolished by 1872.
The following year construction on a second courthouse began a block south of the original. When completed in 1875, it was the only building in Marshall of the French Mansard or Second Empire Style. This then would have been the courthouse during Bellairs's boyhood days in Marshall. However, it too would go the way of the wrecking ball in 1953 and replaced by a modern structure built on this site[1].
Which is too bad. It would have been another gem on the Bellairs Walk.
References
- [1] Nineteenth Century Homes of Marshall, Michigan; Mabel R. Cooper Skjelver (1978), p.14.
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