Built in 1869 to replace a Henry County courthouse that had burned in 1864, the Henry County Courthouse was designed by architect Isaac Hodgson with a mansard roof and a 110-foot clock tower. The courthouse appears on the inside covers of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s novel Raintree County, whose mythical county was based on Henry County, and Lockridge referred to the courthouse tower clock on page five of the Raintree County Atlas as always fixed at nine o'clock in summer. The novel's principal character, John Wickliff Shawnessy, was based on Lockridge's maternal grandfather, John Wesley Shockley, a long-time Henry County resident who later lived in Straughn, Indiana, on the Great National Road with his second wife, Emma Rhoton, and three children. Lockridge acknowledged Henry County as the real Raintree County, whose raintree symbolized the tree of life and the stubborn American idealism he found in the Midwest. Shockley had been a self-taught Hoosier schoolmaster and dreamer who wrote poetry, participated in the Civil War, and was briefly married to Susannah Duke of Henry County, who became the model for the novel's Susanna Drake. Raintree County was adapted in 1957 by MGM as a film starring Montgomery Clift as John Shawnessy, Elizabeth Taylor as Susanna Drake in her first Academy Award nomination, and Eva Marie Saint as Nell Gaither, a character based on Lockridge's high school sweetheart and wife, Vernice Baker.