Clarion developed through a long succession of public buildings, businesses, and civic institutions. The first Clarion County Courthouse was begun in 1842, finished in 1843, and burned in 1859 after a fire caused by a faulty flue; the second courthouse, completed in 1863, also burned, and the present courthouse, designed by E.M. Butz of Allegheny, was erected between 1883 and 1885, later illuminated with a tower clock in 1889 and crowned by a Lady of Justice. Across the years, courthouse square and Main Street were centers of community life, where Squire John M. Sweeney served the public from 1884 to 1925, veterans gathered before the Clarion County Honor Roll, and businesses such as banks, music stores, groceries, hardware stores, dry goods stores, barber shops, cigar factories, hotels, and gas stations shaped daily life. Clarion County Veterans Memorial Park gained the Soldiers Monument in 1896, the first memorial of its kind erected in Pennsylvania with public funds, honoring county residents who served in the Civil War, and W.W. Greenland donated a Civil War cannon ball to the park. The county jail evolved from a sandstone structure built in 1841 to the jail built in 1875, which served as a medium and maximum security prison until 1995; its predecessor was torn down in 1883 and its stones were used in the foundation of the current courthouse. Clarion’s early religious, legal, and commercial buildings included Thomas Sutton’s law office, later the first post office, a Methodist church later sold to Grace Lutheran Church, and a streetscape mapped in 1877 after the town had been named in 1839 by Commissioners Pritner, Potter, and Hamilton. The town’s later history included the First National Bank founded in 1865, Poulain's Music House, visited by Thomas Edison, the Hahne Building, the Masonic Hall, early motor and fire vehicles, the Clarion County Historical Society founded in 1955, the preservation of the Sutton-Ditz House Museum, the career of Judge Theophilus Wilson, the changing identities of the Union House, Hotel Delmar, and Anderson Hotel, the Hotel Meisinger known as the Last Chance, and the Route 322 bridge and nearby Cruise Inn, which was destroyed in 1963 after a runaway tractor-trailer crashed into it.