The courthouse square is the heart of downtown Bedford and a showcase for the local stone industry. The Lawrence County Courthouse, completed in 1931, is a heavy limestone block in restrained Art Deco style — a fitting centerpiece for a town that has supplied limestone to half the great buildings of the United States.
The streets around the square are lined with brick storefronts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many with limestone trim, cornices, and keystones picked out in the local oolitic stone. The whole district is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a good place to start a walk through town and to get a sense of what Bedford looked like at its mining-boom height.