U. S. Post Office and Courthouse (Old City Hall)

Before it was a city hall, the building handled the paperwork of settlement. It housed a U.S. Land Office that processed Homestead Act claims for more than five million acres in southern Nebraska. Its walls are rough quarry-faced stone, set off by smooth arches and stringcourses. Mullett gave it the Second Empire massing and mansard roof with gabled dormers, and Potter added the shallow pointed and trefoil-headed openings of High Victorian Gothic. Inside, ornamental cast-iron stairways survive, and the coffered pressed-metal ceiling of the second-floor courtroom, later the city council chamber, is a restoration.

What the plaque says

U. S. Post Office and Courthouse (Old City Hall) In 1874 construction began on Lincoln's first U. S. Post Office and Courthouse on a block originally intended as a market square. The building was completed by 1879 at a cost of about $200,000. Alfred B. Mullet, supervising architect of the U. S. Treasury and his successor, William Appleton Potter, prepared the design. The building is of brick, faced with Nebraska limestone, and blends Gothic Revival and French Second Empire styles. In 1906, when a new post office and courthouse was completed on the northeast corner of this block, the federal government sold the old building to the city for $50,000. It served as Lincoln's city hall until 1969, when a new county-city building was occupied. Deed provisions required Old City Hall to remain in municipal use or it would revert to federal ownership. In 1969 Old City Hall was one of the first Lincoln buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Lincoln/Lancaster County Historical Society advocated its preservation, and federal, city, and community support accomplished its renovation. It continues to house city and community agencies. Lincoln-Lancaster County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Nebraska State Capitol — 0.6 mi
  Bertram Goodhue's 400-foot tower on the prairie, built in four phases from 1922 to 1932 and paid off on completion, home of the only one-house legislature in the country.
• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 25 mi
  Two hangar-sized halls beside I-80 near Ashland holding the bombers and reconnaissance planes of the command that ran America's nuclear force from Offutt, south of Omaha, from 1948 to 1992.

More markers nearby

• Lincoln's Founding Block — steps away
• The University of Nebraska — 0.3 mi
• County-City Building — 0.4 mi
• Mari Sandoz in Lincoln — 0.5 mi