Ask most people in Centreville what makes the courthouse special and you'll get the same answer: it's the oldest courthouse in continuous use in Maryland. You'll hear it from the historical society, from the tourism brochures, from Wikipedia's own entry on the building. It's the kind of fact that gets repeated so often it stops being checked.
It also stopped being true seven years ago, and almost nobody updated the story.
The Claim Everyone Still Makes
The building at 100 Court House Square went up between 1791 and 1796, built on land carved from the old Chesterfield plantation after the county seat moved from Queenstown. The county court formally accepted it on June 1, 1796, at a cost of $6,800, and the first case had already been heard two years earlier. For more than two centuries, that continuous run of use was the whole point. Every write-up of Centreville leaned on it. The Town of Centreville's own historic sites page still calls it out by name.
Then in 2019, the county opened a brand new Circuit Court building at 200 N. Commerce St., a few hundred feet across the same square. According to the town's own account, the historic courthouse "was the oldest courthouse in continuous use in the State of Maryland until" that new building opened. Past tense. The town said it plainly, in its own copy, and most of the rest of the internet didn't catch up.
What Changed in 2019
The new courthouse broke ground in August 2016 and was built as Maryland's first fully electronic courthouse under the state's MDEC system, roughly 42,000 square feet with two courtrooms that use about half the power of the old one. That's not a small detail. The historic courtroom next door was still being lit by six 750-watt incandescent bulbs right up until the switch. One building ran on Victorian-era wiring logic. The other opened already wired for a digital court docket.
When the new courthouse held its dedication in April 2019, Queen Anne's County Clerk of Court Katherine Hager put the shift into a single line for the local press:
"We've gone from being the oldest to the newest courthouse in the state of Maryland."
That's not a marketing flourish. It's the clerk of the court, on the record, describing her own building losing a title it had held for over 220 years.
The Building That Didn't Go Anywhere
The historic courthouse didn't close. Circuit court functions, the trials and the docket, moved next door, but the county kept the Register of Wills and the Orphans' Court in the original building. So it's still a working government office, still processing real documents, just not the one hearing the cases that once defined "continuous use." That's the nuance most retellings skip: the building stayed open, the specific legal claim to the oldest-in-continuous-use title is what moved down the block.
You can still walk the building's exterior stairs to the basement that was underpinned in the 1960s to add a Cold War fallout shelter, or look up at the coffered tin ceiling held by cast iron columns from an 1876 renovation that doubled the depth of both wings. None of that history got erased. It just stopped being the newest chapter.
A Name That Remembers the Building
Two minutes' walk from the square, at 204 Banjo Lane, Bull and Goat Brewery has been building its own small piece of Centreville since 2016, the same year construction started on the new courthouse across the square. The brewery opened a beer-only taproom in 2017, then added a distillery in 2019, the same year the circuit court moved into its new building. They called the distillery Old Courthouse Distilling.
Whether that name was a deliberate nod to the year's timing or just a good fit for a brewstillery two blocks from a 225-year-old landmark, it's the kind of detail that only makes sense once you know the building's actual status. A distillery named after the "old" courthouse opened in the exact year that courthouse became, officially, the old one, no longer the one currently in continuous use for its original purpose. Old Courthouse Distilling now runs alongside Bull and Goat's beer taps in a converted grain warehouse, pouring rotating brews and whiskey and agave spirit releases a short walk from the square that gave it its name.
The Green Itself
Whatever else changed, the ground in front of the historic courthouse never stopped functioning as the town's actual center. The green is laid out in a French-style parterre, four quadrants cut by brick walkways and bordered in boxwood, a design choice that traces back to Centreville's original French namesake gesture toward the colonies' Revolutionary War ally. At the center of those brick paths stands a bronze statue of Queen Anne, installed and dedicated in 1977 by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne of England in person. It's believed to be the only sculpture of Queen Anne outside England itself. The county's war memorial wall sits on the same green, listing residents who died in service.
None of that required a working circuit court to matter. The green was already doing its job as a gathering point before the 2019 transition and kept doing it after.
What Still Happens on the Square
The clearest proof that the legal downgrade didn't touch the square's social pull is what's still scheduled there. In June 2026, Maryland Crafted: Centreville drew 1,200 to 1,500 attendees from seven states plus Maryland and D.C. to Lawyers Row and Broadway, right against the courthouse lawn, with a VIP add-on that walked ticket holders through a brewery tour at Bull and Goat before feeding them appetizers from Doc's Riverside Grille.
Looking ahead this fall, the same ground hosts:
- The fourth annual CMS Fall Thing Festival on Thursday, October 22, 2026, starting at 4 p.m.
- Centreville Day on Saturday, October 25, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., closing Lawyers Row and Broadway to traffic for a 14th consecutive year of pumpkin painting, a Centreville Idol contest, and the finals of the Great Centreville Cookie Contest
Down toward the water, the Centreville Wharf at 101 Water Way still marks the spot where wheat and cattle once shipped out to Revolutionary War troops, and Doc's Riverside Grille still serves nightly specials and live weekend music a few blocks off the Corsica River. The working parts of downtown, the restaurant, the brewery, the wharf, the green, never depended on which building technically holds the oldest-courthouse title. They depend on people showing up, and they keep showing up.
The Title Changed. The Center Didn't.
The oldest-courthouse claim was never really what made Court House Square the middle of town. It was a fact people repeated because it was true and because it sounded good in a brochure. Now it's a fact that's technically out of date, corrected in the town's own records but still recited everywhere else. The building at 100 Court House Square is a smaller piece of county government than it used to be. The square around it is still where Centreville gathers, still where the brewery two blocks over borrowed its name, still where the town closes the street every fall and calls everyone down to the green.
If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live two blocks from a square that's stayed this busy for over two centuries, Chesapeake Bay Properties knows Centreville block by block, not just by its brochure copy. Schedule a Call and we'll walk you through what living near that green is really like, oldest-courthouse title or not.
