The Ida County Courthouse, built in 1886, occupies the center of Ida Grove's modest downtown and represents a more conventional strand of Iowa civic ambition than the castles nearby. It is a solid Italianate structure in red brick, with a small cupola and the restrained ornamentation typical of courthouse architecture from that era in the rural Midwest.
For the casual visitor it is mainly worth a glance as part of a stroll through downtown — it grounds the town in a more ordinary historical context and serves as a reminder that Ida Grove was, before Byron Godbersen got to work, simply a county seat going about its business like thousands of others on the Great Plains. The surrounding downtown block has the usual small-town Iowa mix of a hardware store, a café, and a few empty storefronts.
The courthouse is an active government building and not generally open for public tours, but the exterior and the courthouse square are freely accessible.