Master builders William B. Phillips and Malcolm F. Crawford embellished central Virginia with a series of dignified courthouses in Thomas Jefferson’s Roman Revival idiom, learned while working at the University of Virginia. The Madison County Courthouse in the town of Madison, completed in 1830 with the assistance of Richard Boulware, survives as perhaps the most forthright example of these builders’ architectural skills. Prominent Jeffersonian devices employed here are the monumental Tuscan entablature and pediment with its lunette window. The arcaded ground floor, a holdover from colonial courthouses, is given a more classical, hence Jeffersonian, quality with the use of keystones and impost courses making them similar in appearance to Jefferson’s arcades on the university’s ranges. The beautiful brickwork, with its even color Flemish bond and precise jointing, is characteristic of Phillips’s craftsmanship.