Taylor County Courthouse (Medford, Wisconsin)

Taylor County Courthouse
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Taylor County Courthouse
Location	224 S. Courthouse Sq. Medford, Wisconsin
Built	1913
Architectural style	Classical Revival
NRHP Reference #	80000198
Added to NRHP	May 14, 1980

The current Taylor County Courthouse, built in 1914, is a Neoclassical-styled three-story building with a metal-clad dome located in Medford, Wisconsin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Taylor County was established on March 4, 1875, formed from parts of larger-than-today Clark, Marathon, Chippewa and Lincoln counties. Plans began almost immediately for a courthouse in Medford.

That first courthouse was built where the current courthouse sits, but the siting was controversial. Two local mill owners, Roberts and Whelen, offered five acres on the west side of the Black River for the courthouse, provided the county buy their lumber for construction at the usual price. The Wisconsin Central Railroad offered a different site for the courthouse, east of the river. Some residents supported Roberts and Whelen, but the County Board of Supervisors accepted the railroad's offer, claiming Roberts and Whelen's site was river bottom. The Board's selection of a bid for construction was itself controversial, because the $15,000 price was considered high, and was not the lowest bid. A town meeting followed in which Roberts and Whelen's site resoundingly won the vote. The county board nixed that and contracted for a courthouse at the railroad's site. But Whelen and his allies got an injunction against that plan and started building a courthouse west of the river. The mess ended up in the state Senate as a bill for the Whelen proposal, countered by a memorandum signed by 440 county citizens against the bill. The Senate passed the bill, but the Assembly sent it into committee, which buried it. In spring of 1876 the courthouse was built east of the river at the Wisconsin Central's site for a price of $5,360.75. Arthur Latton later wrote:

The fight caused so much hard feeling that it made enemies of former friends for a generation. ... Whelen, the energetic, public spirited citizen who had done so much for the new settlement in a business way, and who had almost single-handedly secured the creation of the new county and the location of the county seat at Medford, must have been a very disappointed man. After all the contention and wrangling, he died in September and was buried in Green Bay.