We took Ann back to school Sunday before last, the first day of Daylight Saving Time, and since the day was tolerably warm, I insisted on a short stop in Pontiac, Illinois.

Despite Pontiac being on I-55 between Chicago and St. Louis, a route I’ve driven countless times, I’d never stopped there before, unlike such places as Coal City, Dwight, Lincoln, Atlanta, Litchfield and Mount Olive, just to name some of the smaller burgs along the way.

We didn’t spend that much time there. But time enough for us to walk all the way around the Livingston County Courthouse, which is impressive indeed.

It’s the county’s third courthouse; the first was a small wood-frame structure replaced by the second, which burned down in 1874 (pics of the two are here). Architect John C. Cochrane of Chicago, who also designed the Illinois and Iowa state capitols, designed the current Second Empire structure, which was finished in 1875 and restored recently. Technically, it isn’t a courthouse anymore, since the county’s judicial operations relocated to a new building nearby in 2011, but the county still has offices in the older building.

It wouldn’t be an Illinois town of any size without Lincoln acknowledged somewhere, and in the case of Pontiac, it’s a bronze resting on a bronze split-rail fence. It depicts young lawyer Lincoln, who visited the second courthouse periodically.

An Illinois sculptor named Rick Harney completed the work in 2006. Looking at his portfolio, I wonder if it’s easy to access his bronze of Adlai Stevenson in the Central Illinois Regional Airport. Lincoln is fine, but there aren’t that many Stevensons around, even in Illinois.

Looking around the courthouse square, there’s also a less conventional Lincoln.

The inevitable Route 66 mural.

Some handsome buildings from a time when handsome buildings were built in small towns. Before the Depression at the latest, and more likely before WWI.

And a time capsule underfoot.

Looking a little further into that today, I learned that the International Time Capsule Society is a real thing. I knew I got out of bed for a reason.