The Old Indian River County Courthouse — Vero Beach, Florida

The Old Indian River County Courthouse is the two-story brick and concrete building on 14th Avenue at 22nd Street in downtown Vero Beach that served as the county's first purpose-built courthouse. The Florida Division of Historical Resources survey describes it as Masonry Vernacular and Art Moderne, designed by the architect W.H. Garns, and calls it one of the major federal projects constructed in Florida during that decade. Construction ran from April 1936 to March 1937 and was funded through a loan from the Public Works Administration.

The building stopped serving as the courthouse in the 1990s, when Indian River County moved its courts to a larger building on 16th Avenue. Vero Beach 32963 reported in 2018 that the newer courthouse replaced what is now designated as the Old Indian River County Courthouse, added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on July 19, 1999, and described the original as a handsome brick structure constructed in 1937. The state survey lists the old Vero Beach courthouse as private property.

The county is older than its courthouse by a dozen years. The City of Vero Beach history page records that in 1925 a number of Vero's most prominent citizens lobbied in Tallahassee for a new county they named Indian River, with Vero designated the county seat. The American Courthouses archive gives May 30, 1925, as the creation date and Vero Beach as county seat from 1925 to the present.

For its first years the new government borrowed space. According to the same archive, the county first met in the Seminole Building at Fourteenth Avenue and 21st Street and in the Palmetto Hotel at Old Dixie Highway and 19th Street, and both buildings are still standing in Vero Beach. The state survey dates the Palmetto Hotel to 1921, with an enlargement in 1926, and notes that it was converted to apartments in the 1930s, around the time the county moved into its own building on 14th Avenue.

The courthouse was a 1930s public works project. The state survey states that construction took place from April 1936 to March 1937 and was funded through a loan from the Public Works Administration. The American Courthouses archive puts the cost of the first Indian River County courthouse at $75,000 and lists the architect as W H Garns and Sons, with James T Vocelle and William Hensick and Son as contractors.

The federal register record matches those names. The National Park Service NPGallery record for the Indian River County Courthouse lists Garns, W.H. and Sons and Hensick, William and Son, gives Moderne as the architectural style, names politics and government, architecture and social history as areas of significance, and marks 1937 as the significant year. The state survey adds that, characteristic of the Government Moderne style, the Vero Beach courthouse features very symmetrical design and limited detailing, a restrained look that set it apart from the Mediterranean Revival storefronts of the 1920s nearby on 14th Avenue.

The American Courthouses archive describes the old Vero Beach courthouse as facing east, a two-story buff colored brick and concrete structure on landscaped grounds in the center of Vero Beach. The plan is an H shape. The east front has a central entrance on the first story, the roof line is flat, and the former courtroom is located on the second story.

The county outgrew the 1937 footprint twice before leaving it. An addition was built on the south side in 1957, and another on the north side in 1961, designed by the architect David V Robinson and built by the contractor E M Netto, according to the archive. The NPS record places the Vero Beach building in a period of significance running from 1925 to 1949, which covers both the county's founding years and the 1930s construction, while the 1957 and 1961 wings fall outside that window.

Beyond the courtroom, the 14th Avenue building housed other county functions. The Indian River Guardian reported in 2014 that when J.A. Thompson won election as school superintendent in 1948, the school district administrative office consisted of three rooms on the second floor of the old courthouse. Thompson served as Indian River County superintendent until 1969; in 1948 the county had three high schools, in Vero Beach, Fellsmere and Gifford, and public school enrollment of 2,166.

Lawyers used it as well. A Vero Beach attorney recalled in a 2014 Guardian profile spending his first six months of practice in the early 1960s working from the library of Judge D. C. Smith in the old courthouse while his firm's new office, due west of the old courthouse, was being completed. The state's Great Floridians 2000 program placed its plaque for Sherman N. Smith Jr., elected Prosecuting Attorney of Indian River County in 1940 and later chief judge of the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Vero Beach, at the Court House Executive Center on 14th Avenue, the name the old building carried by the 2000s.

Indian River County built its second courthouse from 1994 to 1997 at a cost of $13,200,000, according to the American Courthouses archive, at 2000 16th Avenue in Vero Beach. Vero Beach 32963 reported in December 2018 that the newer building housed seven courtrooms and that the county had received no bids on a $1.7 million additional courtroom inside it. The current courthouse holds the Circuit Court of the 19th Judicial Circuit and the County Court. The archive describes it as a three-story limestone, concrete and glass building facing west, with a square portico on four black columns and a rounded section with a green dome above, designed by Pierce, Goodwin, Alexander and Linville.

The 1937 building on 14th Avenue went into other hands. It was used as the Court House Executive Center, and the American Courthouses archive, whose photos date from 2009, 2018 and 2023, describes it as now a residence. The City of Vero Beach National Register page lists the Indian River County Courthouse among the city's National Register properties, alongside the Vero Theatre and the Pueblo Arcade farther south on 14th Avenue, and assigns review of such nominations to the Historic Preservation Commission.