William Augustus Edwards, a Darlington native who eventually designed academic buildings at twelve institutions across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, drew the 1908 plans. He worked in the Beaux Arts vocabulary then sweeping American civic architecture: symmetrical mass, classical detailing, a measured monumentality intended to telegraph permanence after the previous courthouse went up in flames. Edwards also designed the adjoining Abbeville Opera House and Municipal Center, and an arcade still connects the two buildings, knitting the east corner of Court Square into a single architectural composition. A 1964 renovation by the Columbia firm Lyles, Bissett, Carlisle, and Wolff modernized the interior. On October 30, 1981, the courthouse joined the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing structure within the Abbeville Historic District.

Inside the central hallway hangs a portrait of John C. Calhoun, twice Vice President of the United States and one of the most consequential and divisive senators South Carolina ever sent to Washington. Calhoun was born southwest of Abbeville on his father's plantation, and he practiced law for a short time on this very square. The courthouse stands on land that once housed the firm where the young Calhoun read law. His ideas about nullification and states' rights, hammered out in the years before the Civil War, would echo from this country square all the way to Fort Sumter. The portrait keeps that history physically present: a building that has burned and sunk and been rebuilt, with the architect of secession's intellectual scaffolding watching from the wall.

Court Square remains the social and visual heart of Abbeville, the kind of intact small-town civic core that Southern preservation movements spend decades trying to save. The courthouse anchors the east corner; the Opera House its neighbor; the Burt-Stark Mansion, where Jefferson Davis convened the last full meeting of his war council in May 1865, sits a few blocks away. Together they make Abbeville a place where the Confederacy arguably began (at Secession Hill, November 1860) and effectively ended (at Burt-Stark, May 1865). The 1908 courthouse, with its quietly assured Beaux Arts facade, presides over that long and uncomfortable history, hosting weekday dockets the way it has for more than a century.