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Description of the Building

The Sheriff’s House is an excellent example of the Second Empire, or French Mansard, style of architecture. Characterized by a blend of Renaissance Revival and Italianate styles popularized in Paris during the reign of Napoleon III, this style enjoyed a rather brief but intense period of popularity in this country between the 1850’s and 1880’s.

During the time of France’s Second Empire (1851-1870), French architects revived the mansard roof, a seventeenth-century design associated with the work of French architect Francois Mansart. In France, the Second Empire was a period of highly charged nationalism, and to the French people the mansard roof was a distinctly French innovation. To Americans, increasingly looking to Paris for the latest in fashion, the Second Empire style was a strikingly modern and sumptuous form of architecture.

The most distinguishing feature of a Second Empire building is the steeply sloped mansard roof, often covered with slate or tin. The roof ridges were decorated with cast iron cresting. Ornamental eave brackets and quoins (decorative bricks at the corners of the walls) embellished the exterior design. The style was well suited to the flamboyant post-civil War and post-railroad era when ostentation and excess were desired and very fashionable.

Example of Second Empire style of architecture.

A Second Empire house is usually symmetrical with two or three stories and a projecting central pavilion taller than the rest of the house. The windows are tall and topped with classical moldings. The house is constructed with a central hall and stair and adjacent room wings that allow use of the rooms on either side of the hall without traffic circulation through the rooms.

The Sheriff's House, built in1882, follows this plan closely. The first floor rooms include a parlor on the north side of the central hall and a sitting room and dining room on the south side. The second floor contains four bedrooms, two each arranged north and south of the central hall. An additional small bedroom and bathroom were added later in the jail addition and were accessible from the second floor central hall.

The kitchen is located in the adjoining jail and is accessible from the house through a butler’s pantry in the back of the dining room. The kitchen also has an outside door that opens onto a small yard on the south side of the building. This yard was used for utility and delivery purposes.

Rooms on the first floor have twelve-foot ceilings and the bedrooms have eleven-foot ceilings. All bedrooms have walk-in closets. There is ornamental wood molding trim throughout which is painted. Floors throughout the house are hardwood and the finished walls and ceilings are plaster. All doors and door and window trim on the first floor were changed to Arts & Crafts-influenced style in the early 1908 as part of a major "modernization".  At the same time, two plate glass windows on the downstairs from were installed.  They replaced the original four over four pane windows.  The coal/wood stoves were also replaced with steam radiators.

All windows on the first and second floor have original frames with some original glass. Doors to all the bedrooms have glass transoms that provide air circulation throughout the upstairs.

The front entrance door was originally a pair of doors with a divided transom window.  It was also replaced in 1908 with the present single door with sidelights. An entrance door on the north side, opening into the original sheriffs' study was closed up many years ago. A steel door in the back opens into the jail and a door from the pantry leads to the kitchen. The wooden front porch was not part of the original building but was added .

The Sheriff's House is the only remaining example of the Second Empire style in Lake County. Other examples in Indiana are the Gruenewald House Museum, Anderson (1872), Benton House, Indianapolis (1873), and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s House and Jail, Noblesville (1875).