The Dallas County Courthouse stands at the centre of Adel's compact downtown and is the town's most photographed building. Built in 1902 in Romanesque Revival style, it is a handsome structure in red brick and limestone, with a prominent tower that anchors the town square. Iowa has some of the finest county courthouses in the Midwest, and the Dallas County Courthouse is one of the better examples of the type — ambitious in scale for a small county seat, well-preserved, and still functioning as intended.
The surrounding courthouse square has a handful of independent businesses and is the venue for the Sweet Corn Festival each August. It is worth a short walk around even if you are only passing through: the square retains the layout and atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Iowa market town better than most places this close to Des Moines.