“We saw the courthouse,” Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie stories, wrote in her diary as she passed through Gage County with her husband and child. “It is handsome.”

The building that Wilder saw, towering four stories above the booming city of Beatrice in 1894, looked a little different than it does in 2009.

But, after a roof replacement stemming from a damaging 2006 hail storm, the Gage County Courthouse will look more like its original incarnation when it is completed later this year.

The Gage County Board of Supervisors accepted a bid of $392,399 by Scott Enterprises, Inc. of Omaha in January to replace the roof of the courthouse. Scott Enterprises is also responsible for re-roofing project on the Saline County Courthouse.

The new roof will be shingled with Vermont Green Slate, identical to the original 1890 roof which was replaced after a 1960 fire damaged a significant portion of the building.

Scott Enterprises recently finished slate work on the tower roof, the courthouse lights have been replaced and work has begun on the rest of the roof.

Job foreman Dwight Busjahn said that the heights of the tower aren’t as burdening as the heat and humidity.

“The heat slows us down, but once we get this going it will get along pretty good,” Busjahn said.

Dave Jones, building and grounds keeper at the courthouse, said the rest of the roof should be completed in a shorter amount of time.

The slate on the roof had to be custom cut as the roofing was placed, and this issue won’t echo throughout the rest of the project.

Jones has also been the relay man with water and ice for the roofing crew.

“Dave has been good about getting us plenty of fluids,” Busjahn said.

The crew will now start work on the south side of the building.

“Then we will move to the east and west sides and put the copper pockets into place and get the chimneys done,” Busjahn said.

The planning stage of the project lasted roughly six weeks, where the crew met with architects and located the source for slate in Vermont.

Slate is a good material to work with, Busjahn said, as it hangs well with the push of a hammer and copper nail. Each palate of slate shingles, weighing just over 4,000 pounds, was hoisted to the roof by a boom truck.

The green-tinted slate is such a good and durable roofing material in fact that Busjahn said a building Scott Enterprises is completing in Chicago on the Northwestern University campus is reusing slate from the original roof built during the Civil War to re-roof the building.

“They had pictures of people who came back from the Civil War with their uniforms still on standing outside that building,” Busjahn said.

Over time, Busjahn said, the sun will darken the shade of green on the shingles.

Jones said that the roof was renovated with asphalt shingles after the 1960 fire.

“The original slate lasted 70 years,” Jones said. “And the reason they got rid of it was because of the fire which forced them to do a major renovation and remodel.”

“They switched over to an asphalt shingle at that point,” Jones began, with Busjahn interjecting immediately.

“They should have redone it with slate then,” he said, matter-of-fact.

Jones praised the crew for the hard work under cruel conditions.

“They are doing a great service for the courthouse and Gage County,” Jones said. “I think it is going to look really, really nice when it is all done.”