Niobrara County was created from the former territory of Converse County by an act of the Wyoming Legislature on February 14, 1911, and was organized on January 6, 1913, with Lusk designated as the county seat after a highly contentious debate over both the county’s creation and Lusk’s selection over Manville. County offices were first housed in the Fraternal Building, for which the county paid the Masonic Lodge a monthly rent of $125, and one of the new Board of County Commissioners’ first acts was to buy land for a jail built in 1913, where the present courthouse was later erected. Funding for the courthouse was not approved until 1918, when a November 6 bond election passed by 422 votes to 393 for $60,000 to cover construction, furnishings, and equipment, though the total cost of construction and furnishings reached $82,405. The building officially opened on February 2, 1920. Built in a 19th century style often used in the central states for government buildings, the two-story courthouse is constructed of deep red brick with porticoes on the east and south entrances, white trim along the roofline, a white brick base, and the words “A Public Office Is a Public Trust” above the south entrance. It originally had a dome topped by a bronze statue of Justice holding scales and surrounded by four large clocks visible from every corner of town, while inside it provided four main offices on the first floor, two offices and a courtroom on the second floor, and basement rooms. The statue of Justice was removed in 1930 because shifting weight and wind vibrations damaged the roof, and she was later scrapped for the war effort in World War II; the dome was also removed and replaced with a small square white cupola. More than one hundred years later, the courthouse remains nearly unchanged from its original construction, apart from a Detention Center added to the north side in 1987.