Now on the second floor, where the only light comes in through frosted-glass windows and a thin chain cordons off the doors to the courtroom, it is almost eerie.

On a recent morning, there was no one on the floor but a man in a camouflage hat.

“I don’t suppose the F.B.I.’s going to be around today?” he asked. There is an F.B.I. field office on the floor, but no one was there. The man left.

Tina Poole, who works cleaning the building, opened the courtroom doors. The beauty is not lost on anyone who works here: the lofty and painted ceiling, the craftsmanship in a wooden eagle and the sunburst that surrounds it, the holding cell with the intricately carved wooden benches, and the plush gravity of the judge’s chambers. Parts of the building seem haunted.

“You know about those three civil rights workers?” Ms. Poole asked unprompted. “Their bodies were kept downstairs in the basement where we now have our credit union.”

It was about 30 miles north of here, in the town of Philadelphia, that the civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were jailed, released and shot point-blank in an ambush on a country road on June 21, 1964. The Klansmen who were part of the conspiracy, or most of them, at least, were put on trial here three years later.

Stanley Dearman, 80, covered the trial as a local reporter. He had broken stories in this room before: in 1961, acting on a tip from a court clerk, he was the first to report that a suit had been filed here on James Meredith’s behalf to desegregate the University of Mississippi.