The Henry County Sheriff’s Residence and Jail is a government building in Napoleon, Ohio, United States. Built in 1882 and designed by architect D. W. Gibbs, the residence and jail are located next to the Henry County Courthouse in the city center.
On November 9, 1879, a fire destroyed the previous Henry County Courthouse. Within three months, the county secured approval from the Ohio General Assembly to issue bonds to pay for the construction of a new courthouse, sheriff’s house, and jail. The jail side of the resulting brick building, designed to be fireproof, was built to separate male inmates from female inmates and young inmates from older inmates. Its twelve iron cells are connected by sixty-foot-long concrete-floored corridors. A report prepared by the state board of humanities in 1913 noted that the building was equipped with electricity, hot and cold running water; it was the responsibility of the sheriff to maintain the jail and provide its inmates with food. Some prisoners in Henry County were housed separately: many smaller jails, with a capacity of one to four cells, were maintained by villages in the county.
In the 1980s, the sheriff’s house and jail retained a high degree of integrity; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 24, 1981, in recognition of its architectural significance. In the late 1980s, the building changed its purpose: by then, rising crime rates had led to overcrowding in many jails in northwest Ohio. In early 1989, officials from five northwestern Ohio counties and the city of Toledo agreed to create a single regional jail complex. As Henry County was part of this consortium, the 1882 building was no longer used for incarceration purposes; instead, it was converted into offices for the sheriff’s department, a call center for the county’s 9-1-1 system, and office space for other county agencies. Today, the jail remains the location of the sheriff’s office.