Owingsville's Square Just Got a Second Clock Tower, and the Old One Never Left
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Stand at the corner of Main and Water Street this month and look up twice. You'll see two clocks, both keeping reasonable time, both mounted on cupolas within a block of each other. One has watched over the square since a remodel added it in the early 1900s. The other is five months old.
Most towns that build a new courthouse eventually stop needing the old one. Bath County built a new one anyway, right downtown, and left the original standing exactly where it's stood for over a century. That choice, more than the ribbon-cutting itself, is what actually changed on the square this year.
The Bath County Judicial Center at 65 Water Street was completed in March 2026, according to the Kentucky Court of Justice. The project was completed March 2026, and the Bath County Judicial Center is a two-story facility that houses all court services for Bath County, including circuit and district court, the circuit court clerk's office and statewide programs. If you've had to show up for jury duty, record a deed, or deal with the circuit clerk's office anytime since, this is where you went instead of the building you probably grew up walking past.
The pace of the news around it tells you something about the town, too. When the Bath County News-Outlook checked in on the project's Project Development Board this spring, there wasn't much to report because there wasn't much left to do. Work on Bath County's new Judicial Center was winding down, and members of the Project Development Board overseeing the project met for a little over five minutes on Monday to get updates. A five-minute meeting is what a construction project looks like when it's basically finished and everyone involved would rather get back to work.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only glance at the new building from the road. It wasn't designed to look modern. It was designed to look like it belongs next to the courthouse that's been anchoring the square since before anyone currently living in Bath County was born.
The architecture firm behind the project, Sherman Carter Barnhart, was explicit about this. The goal of reflecting the historic and tradition of the original county courthouse meant designing a traditional architectural solution with a brick exterior, stone accents, a formal entry with traditional stone columns, arched windows, traditional cornices, and a prefinished sloped metal roof. The clock tower isn't incidental either. The judicial center is highlighted by a signature feature, a cupola that features a working clock reminiscent of the original courthouse. Inside, the choices keep pointing the same direction: continuing the tradition and prominence of the courthouse exterior, the interior includes a central monumental stair leading to an interior balcony.
None of that was the easy path. The firm noted that finding room for a modern judicial building inside a small county seat was genuinely difficult, since downtown lots in Owingsville tend to be tight and there wasn't much open ground to work with. The project could have gone the way a lot of county judicial centers go: out past the edge of town, along a highway, where land is cheap and parking is simple. Instead, the board worked through the harder problem of fitting a two-story courthouse-style building onto a small downtown site rather than solving the space issue by leaving downtown altogether.
That matters because the old courthouse was never scheduled to disappear. It's still standing on Courthouse Square, the same white brick building with the T-shaped floor plan and the clock and dome sitting on top of it, and it has survived worse than a change of address for the circuit clerk. The county was created in 1811, and the first courthouse went up on that same square between 1813 and 1815. It burned down on May 21, 1864, reportedly from an overheated stove, and the building that replaced it got its clock tower and columns in a 1903 to 1904 remodel, the same features you can still pick out from Main Street today.
That building, along with 32 other structures around it, is part of a federally recognized historic district. The Owingsville Commercial District and Courthouse Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and expanded by a boundary increase listing in 1985, with the original listing covering 33 contributing buildings on 8 acres. A building with that kind of protection and that kind of history doesn't get quietly emptied out because the county built somewhere new to handle paperwork. It stays the visual anchor of the square whether or not court is in session inside it.
The easy version of this story is a building got finished. The more useful version is that Bath County had a choice about where to put its future civic business, and it chose to keep that business walking distance from the same storefronts it's always been walking distance from. Willoughby's Down Home Restaurant on Suddith Street, a short walk off the square, still gets the lunch crowd that comes out of downtown business the way it always has. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that either keeps happening or quietly stops, depending on whether a county seat's civic buildings stay downtown or drift toward a bypass.
Owingsville's square, for now, keeps both. The old clock tower didn't lose its job. It just got company.
None of this changes the reasons people already had for spending time downtown this time of year, and a few of those are worth naming while they're still in season.
None of that required a new building to stay true. But it's a reminder that the square's daily rhythm, court business and farmers market and burger stand alike, is still built around the same few downtown blocks it always was. That's the actual news buried inside a construction update. Owingsville added a courthouse this year without subtracting one, and that's not nothing for a town its size.
If you're watching Owingsville from a distance and wondering what a place like this is actually like day to day, that's the kind of detail worth paying attention to. A town that keeps investing in its own downtown instead of hollowing it out tends to be a good sign for whoever ends up living there next.
If you have questions about Bath County or the towns around it, from Owingsville to Sharpsburg to Salt Lick, Zachary Otis grew up here and still works these communities every day. Let's Connect.
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