Dauphin County Courthouses

The early courthouse housed the State legislature until architect Stephen HIlls completed the State Capitol, and the county relocated to a building on the corner opposite to the jail. By 1822 the county was back in the courthouse, which Hills had enlarged (for the legislators) by adding a two-story addition to the front.

It was in front of this enlarged building that Harrisburg witnessed its first anti-slavery riot, on April 21, 1825, as a crowd of African American men "armed with clubs and cudgels," confronted several Maryland men who had captured an African American man in Harrisburg as a fugitive slave. In the melee that erupted, one of the Harrisburg rioters was shot in the arm and sixteen African American men were arrested by county sheriff Captain Thomas Walker. Walker had commanded the Harrisburg Volunteers, a military company that marched to the defense of Baltimore in 1814.

In April 1845, American Anti-Slavery Society speakers Abby Kelley and Jane Hitchcock were booked into the Courthouse for speeches. The women's speeches were disrupted by firecrackers and rotten eggs. Both women were threatened with a tar and feathering if they did not immediatley leave Harrisburg. Despite the threats, Kelley returned in March 1848 to speak again in this same location.

A more famous and violent incident occurred in August 1847 when William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass attempted to address a crowd at the Courthouse. Garrison was able to speak, but when Frederick Douglass, who would have been the first Afican American to publicly address a white audience in the Courthouse, rose to speak, rowdies in the crowd pelted the speakers with rotten eggs and bricks, effectively breaking up the meeting.