Decorah’s courthouse square developed as the civic and architectural center of Winneshiek County after Decorah was chosen county seat in 1851 over rival claims by Moneek, Lewiston, and later Freeport. William and Elizabeth Day and William Painter contributed land for the square, taxpayers voted $6,000 for a courthouse in 1856, and the building was finished in 1857; its jail space in the west basement was replaced by a new jail on the southeast corner in 1878, and the courthouse itself was demolished in 1902 and replaced after more than 10 feet of soil were removed from the hill, with cut limestone from obsolete retaining walls reused throughout town. Around the square, changing buildings reflected Decorah’s growth: schools and the post office gave way to a public library, a church annex, and an office and apartment building. The square also became a center of religious life. Methodist worship began with circuit rider Elder Bishop in September 1851, and the first church building in Decorah, a wood frame Methodist church from the 1850s, was replaced by a brick Gothic Revival church dedicated in 1876 after the original building was moved east of the Congregational Church. The Congregational church, organized in 1851 under Rev. A.M. Eastman, built its first brick Gothic Revival church in 1860 and replaced it in 1896 with another Gothic Revival building designed by Orff and Joralemon of Minneapolis. On the southeast corner, a Lutheran congregation formed after an 1889 split in the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church and built a frame Gothic Revival church in the 1890s; the present church on that site was built in 1958-60. St. Benedict’s Catholic Church, whose original building had stood elsewhere since 1864, erected its present church on the square in 1917 from a design by Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, completed after his death by Edwin H. Lundie. Education also shaped the square’s history. John Breckenridge, a Massachusetts-born educator and former superintendent of schools, opened the private Decorah Institute in 1874 in the relocated original Methodist church, offering subjects from classical languages and sciences to bookkeeping, typing, and stenography and helping Norwegian immigrants by learning their language and teaching them English. Students came from nearby counties and from as far away as New York, boarding in homes and at the Arlington House, until the school closed in 1911. Nearby, Alonzo Bradish’s Greek Revival home, built in 1860 by G.F. “Deacon” Francis, remained another prominent part of the square’s historic setting.