September 28, 2025: The Mitchell County Courthouse in Osage.
A recent story about county courthouses says the newest one is in Pottawattamie County in 1978. This is wrong, twice over.
Dickinson County built a new courthouse in stages in 2006 and 2009. All county offices and the jail are part of the facility in Spirit Lake. It is much larger than the previous one, as the county’s population is much bigger than it was in the 1860s, in addition to holding all services.
The Mitchell County Courthouse in Osage, built in 1858, had major issues in the early 2010s. It was vacated in 2013. The matter of whether to restore or replace got exceptionally heated. Two bond referendums failed, but the county supervisors moved forward with a different bonding method to build a new one anyway. The new courthouse opened in August 2015, and from the exterior, it’s designed to look as much like the old one as possible but with extensions (wings) on either side.
Maybe it takes someone who’s been to every county courthouse to know off the top of their head that Council Bluffs hasn’t had Iowa’s youngest courthouse for two decades.