[2] Clay County is included in the Terre Haute, Indiana, Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The first Courthouse was built in the newly platted town of Bowling Green in 1828.

By the late 1830s Clay County had grown to the extent that the first Courthouse could no longer provide adequate facilities.

By the 1860s the towns of Harmony, Knightsville, and Brazil were growing rapidly, due in part to their location along the National Road, and also because of the many coal companies in that area.

An effort to move the county seat of government to a more central location, which had begun in the 1850s, grew stronger creating controversy among citizens.

In the 1860s citizens in the northern section of Clay County became more organized in their efforts.

In 1871 brothers Robert and John Stewart donated land along the National Road in Brazil for a new courthouse.

$5,300 was also raised by citizens in the area to entice the commissioners to move the seat of government from Bowling Green to Brazil.

In 1912 John W. Gaddis, a prominent architect in Vincennes, Indiana, entered into a contract with the County Commissioners to design, plan, and oversee the construction of a new courthouse.

Bailey and Charles A. Koemer of Louisville, Kentucky was accepted in 1912 with the cornerstone being laid in the fall of 1912.

Gaddis had completed several others: in Fairfield and Robinson, Illinois: Perryville, Missouri and two in Indiana, the Putnam County Courthouse in Greencastle (1905) and the Huntington County Courthouse (1906) in Huntington, which are also in Classical Revival mode.

The judge on the court is elected to a term of four years and must be a member of the Indiana Bar Association.

Each of these elected officers serves a term of four years and oversees a different part of county government.