Mount Vernon’s public square was laid out in 1816. The present courthouse, built in 1876 at a cost of $95,000, dominates the square with Italianate-style elegance in a lavishly decorated brick and stone design featuring bracketed projecting cornices, wide returns at the eave lines, and a spectacular cupola with columnar pilasters, round-arched windows, elliptical arches, a dome, and oculi between its ridge lines. Along the west side of the square, a collection of late nineteenth-century storefronts preserves facades common to many commercial buildings of the period. On the northeast corner stands the Alvin P. Hovey residence, built in the early 1850's; Hovey was born in Mount Vernon in 1821, had a brilliant career as a soldier, was appointed U.S. Minister to Peru, was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1886, became Governor of Indiana in 1888, and died in office in 1891. South of the courthouse stands a World War memorial Coliseum built in the mid-1920's, whose three entry doors on the first floor signify the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, and which served as a hospital and dormitory for citizens displaced during the disastrous Ohio River Flood of 1937. The courthouse limestone was quarried in Bedford, Indiana.