Built in 1936 by Contractor T. G. Rowland, the Lincoln County Courthouse was designed by Kalispell architect
Fred A. Brinkman. Brinkman, whose parents emigrated from Germany, lived the majority of his working life in Kalispell, the city in which his family finally settled. Though born in Spokane, Washington in November 1892, Brinkman's family moved to Kalispell, Montana when he was an infant. A dozen or more of Brinkman's extant works in and around Kalispell have been entered in the National Register.
The Lincoln County Courthouse was one of two gifts received by the city of Libby from the WPA in the '30s, the other being the former city hall. Both were art deco in design, the city hall being completed several years prior to construction of the courthouse.
Sadly, by the mid '70s the city and the county had grown sufficiently as to require larger courthouse premises. This led the county to build a large contemporary styled addition on the front of the original building, almost completely covering its front elevation. A casual viewer would not even realize that an art deco WPA building was hiding behind the larger 1978 pile of red bricks. The primary impetus for the county's growth at that time was federal spending in relation to the construction of the
Libby Dam, about 15 miles to the east of the town. A cooperative effort between Canada and the U.S., the dam was built in 1972 to provide both flood control and hydroelectric power on the Kootenay/Kootenai River.
On the front lawn of the courthouse a time capsule was placed beneath a large boulder on September 27, 1989, to be opened September 27, 2089. The Lincoln County Centennial Time Capsule was placed in celebration of Montana's being the 41st state to join the Union on November 8, 1889.
And I liked the New Deal impact on Libby’s public buildings, such as the WPA Deco City Hall, which is now solely the domain of the police department. Then there is the Lincoln County Courthouse, truly a story of two buildings in one as the mid-1930s Art Deco-styled courthouse received a totally new front, in a contemporary style, in the 1970s as the town and county expanded in the wake of the federal spending in constructing Libby Dam. The rectangular blockiness, flat roof, and band of windows set within a symmetrical façade makes the courthouse one of the state’s best designs for a rural public building in the late 20th century.
From Montana's Historic Landscape