The Lenawee County Courthouse is a county courthouse located at 309 North Main Street (M-52) in the city of Adrian in central Lenawee County, Michigan. It was designated as a Michigan Historic Site on November 14, 1974 and later added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 28, 1991. The Lenawee County Courthouse is located at the corner of M-52 (known locally at this point as North Main Street) and West Front Street. West Front Street also carries the M-52 signage as it turns to form the northern edge of the U.S. Route 223 business loop around the Downtown Adrian Commercial Historic District.
When Lenawee County was first organized in 1826, its county seat was the newly established village of Tecumseh. When Tecumseh lost the county seat to Adrian in 1838, a new courthouse was built in Adrian. That courthouse burned down in 1852, and a temporary courthouse stood in its place until the completion of the present-day courthouse, which was completed in 1885. Since then, it has served as the seat of the county government. The courthouse was designed by Toledo, Ohio native Edward Fallis, who designed many courthouses in several states. It was built in the style of Romanesque Revival architecture, and one year after its construction, Fallis used it as a model for his design of Ohio's Paulding County Courthouse. Despite its numerous interior alterations, the courthouse remains one of the most impressive of Michigan's surviving late nineteenth-century courthouses.
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