USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 59
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Those indebted to Dr. Hines are desired to remit the sums due- he being confined to jail deprives him of the pleasure of calling person- ally on his friends-they will therefore oblige their unfortunate friend by complying with this request without loss of time.
Hamilton county prison, October 29, 1799.
The total cost of jails for the county to and including this year, for building, repairs, etc., is ascertained to have been three thousand and thirty-two dollars.
Mr. Cist's Miscellany, a treasure-house of Cincinnati and Miami antiquities, also furnishes the following inter- esting remarks and reminiscences :
As a gallows stood in 1795 on Walnut below Fifth street, the pre- sumption is that it had not unfrequently been made nse of, although there is little pioneer lore on the subject, and its victims must have been distinct from the military corps, in which deserters are shot, not hung. But in those days the gallows, the pillory, and the whipping-post, were appendages of civilized society, two of them in the farther advance of civilization driven ont of existence, and the third in a rapid process of extinction. Several of our citizens survive [1845] who have witnessed not only these structures, but also the administration of justice under their operation. Jonah Martin, while a youth, was present when Sher- iff Goforth inflicted the "forty stripes save one" upon a woman con_ victed of setting fire to haystacks, and Mr. Samuel Stitt witnessed the same punishment applied to another woman guilty of theft, by the hands of Levi McLean, the deputy sheriff and jailor at that time. It must not be inferred, however, that the infliction was as severe as it appeared to be. Goforth was a man of great humanity, and even McLean, al_ though jailor, pound-keeper, butcher, and constable, four hard-hearted vocations, played on the fiddle and taught singing-school.
" Men are not steel, but steel is bent, Men are not flints-even flint is rent."
and Levi, unless his prisoners rebelled on his hands, or he had himself taken a glass too much, in which case he would turn in and take a flog-
ging frolic among his pets, without making much distinction between debtors and criminals, was rather a good-natured fellow than otherwise.
Thirty-six years later, persons are yet living who saw "many a man," as they express it, tied up and whipped at this post. The following is the court record in one of these cases :
At a special court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, holden at Cincinnati, in and for the county of Hamilton, in the territory of the United States northwest of the Ohio river, on the twenty-first day of August, 1792, the grand jury return a bill of indictment against Patrick Dorsey, for feloniously stealing and carrying away from the armorer's shop at Fort Washington, in said county, on Saturday the eighteenth day of August instant, one silver watch, of the value of fifteen dollars.
The prisoner, Patrick Dorsey, pleads not guilty, and thereupon trial was had, and the jury say: "We, the jury, do find the prisoner guilty, as stated in the indictment." Thereupon the court sentenced the aforc- said Patrick Dorsey to receive twenty-five stripes on his bare back, and also to pay to Peter Davis, from whom the watch aforesaid was stolen (the said watch being restored to said Peter again), the sum of fifteen dollars, together with the costs of prosecution, herein taxed at eight dollars and twenty-five cents.
The whipping-post stood about one hundred feet west of Main and fifty south of Fifth street, near the line of Church alley. The jailer usually did the whipping, and it is said that sometimes, when he was intoxicated, he would take down the cat-o'-nine-tails and, going in among the prisoners, administer an indiscriminate flagellation on general principles.
In the matter of executions, the county has been sin- gularly fortunate, considering its population and crime record during the last half century, scarcely more than half a dozen men having been hanged in it, under sen- tence of the courts, during that period.
The third jail, built up town after the burning of the first court-house and the leasing of the county's half of the public square, stood on the west side of Sycamore street, between Hunt and Abigail, not far from the pre- sent county prison. It was a more spacious and com- fortable affair, built of brick, with fourteen rooms for prisoners, and a yard enclosed with a high brick wall, in which they might take exercise. It was occupied until the construction of the new court house and jail was so far advanced that a transfer of prisoners could be made.
THE SECOND COURT HOUSE.
The first court house was used as a barrack during part of the War of 1812-15; and the carelessness of some soldiers who were playing cards in one of the rooms or in the garret, resulted in the destruction of the building by fire early in the year 1814. The county commissioners then decided to remove the temple of justice further out-to a point then almost, or quite, out of the village -upon a large lot tendered the county as a gift by Mr. Jesse Hunt, its owner, near the present intersection of Main and Court streets. The new building was soon begun, but, though no great structure for size or elabora- tion of architecture, it occupied several years in building, and was not finished until 1819. Judge Carter has sup- plied an elaborate description of this court house in his recent volume of Reminiscences and Anecdotes, which we copy in full by" permission :
It was situated, itself and appurtenances, on a circular plat of ground about two hundred feet in diameter-just where our present modern court house stands. It was a substantial and spacious structure, about sixty-two feet in length east and west, and fifty-six feet in breadth north
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
and south, and elevated to the cornice fifty feet, to the summit of the dome or cupola on the centre of the uprising, four-sided roof, one hun- dred and twenty feet, and to the top of the spire one hundred and sixty feet. It contained two fire-proof rooms, in which the clerk of the court of common pleas and the supreme court, and the recorder of deeds kept their offices. On the first floor over the basement was a large, spacious, and commodious court room, finished and furnished in a style of much neatness and even elegance for days of yore. This great room extended the whole length of the building, and was near thirty feet in width. On the north side of the court room, before large windows, was the large elevated bench for the judges, and here the presiding judge and his three associates sat and judged, and administered jus- tice according to the law. Immediately before the bench was the law- yers' long table, and at each end was the clerk's and the sheriff's places or desks. The place for the lawyers, or bar of the court room, was sep- arated from the auditory by a long, open, heavy, colonnaded balustrade, .about four feet high, reaching the whole length of the room, and entered by a gate attended by the janitor, who sat in a chair by it, and faithfully attended, that no intruders should enter the sacred precincts without leave or license. The space outside and south of the bar was devoted to spectators, being open in front and having benches under the gallery for the accommodation of those who had business in and before the court, and who sat in anxious expectation, awaiting call by their lawyers. Above, extending the whole length of the room, was a large enclosed gallery filled with seats, also for the accommodation of the people when anything very important was going on, which attracted crowds to the court house. This gallery was supported by some half a dozen columns underneath, in front, and the ceiling of the court room, under a large beam or cross-piece, was supported by one very large corinthian-capped column, and this stood on a large frame-work pedestal built on the floor. The jury so much in use in the courts were accommodated with some fixed arm-chairs, away from the lawyers' table, and just beyond the whitened large column, and were thus in position to be conveniently addressed by the lawyers and by the court. Immediately before the judges' long bench, on the balustrade of the bar, about the middle of it, was placed the prisoners' dock, or box, an elevated, open-worked, enclosed, white-painted platform, with a long seat, sufficient to accommodate six or eight prisoners, and, being as high as the bench of the judges, and in juxtaposition to it, it was so conspicuous that it was a continued and continuous eye-sore to the judges, lawyers, and citizens, and an ugly, displayed pillory for the poor-devil prisoners who were placed in it at times and became the closely observed of all observers. The floor of the old court room, within the bar, was usually covered with a large, striped rag-carpet; and this was strewn over hither and thither with huge spittoons, for the accommodation of those of the bar and others who had the habit of chewing tobacco, and they were numerous. The court room was well lighted and well ventilated, having three or four large windows thirteen feet long by five feet wide, on each end, and seven smaller ones on the north side. At the east end was a large chimney, and in it a huge fire- place, which, when containing a large fire, as it always did in the winter time, kept things considerably warm around about, and besides this, near the centre of the room, was a very large, old fashioned rectangular stove with large extended pipe, so that there was no com- plaint of cold when fires were completely on and the old sergeant-at- arms was in good health and all about.
This room, the only court room in the building at first, was a very spacious, convenient, and commodious one for all the purposes of law and justice, and we doubt if there were many better court rooms in the land. For thirty years it proved sufficient and capable, and as one room with others would have been quite so to-day for all purposes of bench, bar, and people. The old people, as well as the old judges and the lawyers, took much pride in the old court room. Afterwards, about the year 1838, there was another smaller court room constructed in the old court house. This was in the sec- ond story, immediately above the one described, and was occupied by a new court, which the exigency of the times seemed to require, called the superior court, and now remembered as the old superior court. The old court house also contained a sheriff's office, not very large, but convenient in its arrangement, on the southwest corner, and a county commissioners' office, and a grand-jury room, and several other jury rooms. The great building had three large outside doors on the east, on the west, and on the south sides, opening out into stoops with stone steps to the ground on the east and west, and wooden porch and steps on the south side. The number of large win- dows in its walls above and below, and on every side, was about fifty, and all these were ornamented with the old-fashioned green venetian
blinds; while the outside walls of the court house were painted a pale cream, or nearly white color, giving to the building a marked, distinc- tive, and even beautiful appearance as seen from every side, especially as it was adorned with a large central square dome erected on the middle of the ascending four-sided roof, and this dome surmounted by a cupola with green venetian blind windows and a tall spire above it, with long, gilded vane, and the four cardinal points on it with gilded letters, N., S., E., W., and two huge balls above and below, all shining in luminous gold. In former days no court-house could be built and exist and live without a steeple-
" Saint Patrick was a gintleman, And came from dacent paple; He built a church in Dublin town, And on it placed a staple."
And as with the churches, so with the court houses of former days, they were literally nothing without a spire for aspiring minds. They were of no account without a " staple" for the stable, staple, and steepling ambition of young fledged lawyers, whose flight might reach its highest pinnacle.
The dome, spire, and steeple of the old court house were the tall- est of the kind in ye ancient days, and commanded the admiration, and almost the adoration, of the old people; and the old court house was the centre of attraction for the judges, the lawyers, and the people. As the old court house was the centre of attraction, so it stood in the centre of a large, circular plat of ground, with the streets forming a capacious way all around. On the periphery or circumference was erected a white painted rail-fence, with four ornamented gates to the yard of the court house, one on each side, with the cardinal points. The yard within was sodded with green grass, slanting and inclining from the basement walls of the court house, and adorned in neat and orderly manner with locust trees and shrubbery; and from each of the gates there were wide pathways leading to the court house doors, and one or two of these were paved with large flat flagstones, so that the "circular square " of the court house had quite a beautiful and attrac- tive appearance.
After some years, the necessities of increased business requiring it, there were two separate buildings erected on Main street on the front line of the square, one north and one south of the line of the court house, the former one occupied by the treasurer, auditor, and county commissioners' offices, and the latter by the offices of the clerk of the court of common pleas and the county surveyor; and these were quite neat and eligible buildings for their purposes, adorned with side, cov- ered porticos as they were, and flights of steps leading up to them over the offices in the first or basement story. They of course added much to the importance and attraction of the court house square, and converted the shape of the grounds from a circle to a larger segment of a circle.
The large plat of ground upon which the old court house and its appertaining surroundings stood, was given to the county of Hamilton for the purposes of a court house and county offices by Jesse Hunt, an old, respected, opulent, pioneer, public-spirited citizen of Cincinnati, and the grandfather of our present United States senator, Hon. George H. Pendleton, on the mother's side-about the year 1814 or 1815. But at that time the grounds were considered far out of town, and it was some time before the minds of the citizens of the city could be brought to any unanimity on the subject of locating the public build- ings of the county there, so far off from the limits of the stores and dwellings of the town. But at last the gift was accepted, and opera- tions were commenced for the erection of the court house, and they dragged their slow length along, and it was not until the close of the year 1819 that the court house was completely finished and ready for full occupation, and then it was occupied; and then commenced the proper, prosperous, and profound history of the old court house.
In the afternoon of Monday, July 9, 1849, this old and noble struc- ure burned up, or down, and nothing was left of it but its thick, black- ened walls, and they had been made and builded to last forever. Fire had been communicated to it by a neighboring pork-house conflagration on a warm summer's day. It caught on its exposed tinder roof and cu- pola, and soon roof, dome, cupola, spire, and steeple were wreathed and enveloped in smoke and flames. I remember intently gazing at the surrounding, wrapping, warping, writhing, enclosing flames from the immense roof, and these whirring, whirling, and curling and leaping amidst the densest black smoke from the now fired frame-work of the come and steeple, presented a flaming and famous scene for a painter. Dome, spire and steeple and roof soon fell with a tremendous crash into the midst of the enclosing and enveloping walls, which were only blackened and not injured in their structure by the fire in the least, and
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
they stood for a long while a sort of ruined monument of former justice and law, for lawyers "to look and admire-rire-rire," and citizens to gaze and wonder at what had been done for so many long years within those now blackened, scorched, and charred walls.
During the burning of the roof and dome and tower of the old court house it was a very curious and interesting sight to see unmerous doves or pigeons flying in extended circles about the flames, as near as the fierce heat would permit them. The cupola had been a long-time home for the pigeons of the city. There they had been reared them- selves, and there they had been in turn raising their young, many of whom no doubt perished in the flames; and the now-devonring flames they encircled and encircled in their lofty flight in the air, apparently, like the dove of old, without a place whereon to set their feet. It was indeed a sort of romantic tableau. The old court house, it seems, was the home of the pigeons, as well as the judges and lawyers, et illud omne genus. It was a great old court house, and had a great history in its eventful days. Sorry to part with it.
Drake and Mansfield's book, entitled Cincinnati in 1826, has the following derogatory remarks concerning the old court house:
It presents neither in its domestic economy nor external architecture a model of convenience or elegance. Its removal from the centre of the city is justly a cause for complaint.
THE TEMPORARY COURT HOUSES.
After the fire the courts and county offices, and the law library, found a temporary home in a large brick build- ing of four stories on the northwest corner of Court street and St. Clair alley, owned by Mr. James Wilson, and afterwards occupied by Messrs. Wilson, Eggleston & Company, as a pork-packing house. The offices went to the second floor; the four rooms required by the Su- preme court, the court of common pleas, the superior and commercial courts, were found on the third floor; and the law library, then very small, was put in a small room on the same floor, near Canal street, and looking out upon the alley. After the common pleas was re- organized and enlarged in 1852, more room was required; and in order to keep the common pleas rooms together, the third floor was given up to them; the superior and commercial courts were provided for on the second floor of a building across the alley, on Court street, the two structures being connected by a bridge from one second floor to the other. Mr. W. W. Scarborough says in his His- torical Address on the Bar Library, published in 1865 :
It is not to my purpose specially to describe those buildings, or to chronicle the many rich things done and said there. No one of the bar of that time could wish a more felicitous subject. But it was an evil place, no place of seeds, or of figs, or of vines, or of pome- grantaes.
By the time the new courts had gone in operation un- der the constitution of 1852, the lower story of the new court house was so far completed that the county com- missioners directed the courts to be removed from the packing-house to such rooms as were ready in the new building. They were small, dark, and cold; and the judges and the bar had a generally unpleasant time of it there. Finally, one of the judges had a long siege with sore eyes, as a result of his attendance in these rooms, and, by arrangement with the supreme judge and the three common pleas judges, who together constituted the dis- trict court, he secured a peremptory order to the sheriff that other quarters for the courts should be obtained. The sheriff accordingly rented from the owner, Henry Snow, a member of the bar, the large building on the
northeast corner of Ninth and Walnut streets, which he fitted up in comfortable style for the several courts; and there they were held until the spacious and well lighted court rooms in the second story of the new court house were ready for occupation. The county commissioners, albeit the removal had been accomplished without their sanction, cheerfully indorsed the action, and ordered all bills incurred by it paid by the county.
THE NEW COURT HOUSE.
In 1851, county commissioners Timanus, Black, and Patton, in pursuance of previous orders, awarded the con- tract for a new court house, the fine building now occu- pied by the county officers, the courts, and the bar library, and for the jail, to Messrs. M. H. Cook & Company, for the total sum of six hundred and ninety-five thousand two hundred and fifty-three dollars and twenty-nine cents. The work was to be done according to the plans and spec- ifications submitted by Isaiah Rogers, architect. The work was commenced, but suffered many frequent delays occasioned by change of plans and conflicting views as to style and utility. The building stands on the east side of Main street and faces west at the intersection of Main and Court streets. The length of the front is one hundred and ninety feet, extension back one hundred and ninety feet, and the height sixty feet, being three stories high above the pavement entrance. The ground rooms are occupied by the county treasurer, coroner, sheriff, and surveyor, with apartments in the rear cor- ners alloted to the recorder and county clerk. The main entrance leads up wide iron stairs to the rotunda room on the second floor, wherein the criminal court is held.
Around this central court room pass wide halls, from which direct entrances are had to the auditor's, recorder's, and clerk's offices; also to the grand jury rooms and the probate court. On the third floor are the courts of com- mon pleas, superior court, the law library, and the sten- ographers' quarters. The building is of the most substan- tial stone and brick work, fire-proof, easy of access, well lighted from the outside and centrally from a glass dome in the middle of the building.
Immediately back of the court house is the county jail, facing east on Sycamore street and surrounded by a high wall. The jail is connected with the court house by subterranean passages. Between these main buildings, shut out from public view, the executions by hanging are conducted. The estimated cost of the jail was two hun- dred and twenty-six thousand five hundred and twenty dollars. It, like the court house, is constructed of Dayton limestone, and was built later than the court house, being commenced in 1861. Its style of architecture is Doric and Corinthian. All the work inside the cells, etc., is made of boiler iron. . The number of cells is one hun- dred and fifty-two.
SOME OFFICIAL ANTIQUITIES.
The original appointments of justices of the peace for Hamilton county were noted in chapter IX of this work. Among them was William Goforth, who entered upon his duties about one month after appointment. His
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
official docket, in part at least, has been preserved; and is a curiosity in its way. We have the pleasure of presenting
EXTRACTS FROM JUDGE GOFORTH'S DOCKET.
1790.
February 2. Took the oath of allegiance to the United States of America, and the oath of office as a justice of the peace for the county of Hamilton.
February 4. Joseph Gerard took the oath of allegiance to the Uni- ted States of America, and was qualified as constable.
August 12. I received a visit from Esq. Wells and Mr. Sedam, an officer in the army, who spent most of the day with me, and towards evening, as they were going away and I was walking with them to the boat, Esq. Wells introduced a conversation with me respecting the pernicious practice of retailing spirituous liquors to the troops, and informed me that General Harmar wished me to write to Cochran and some others, in order to prevent such mischiefs as were taking place. I observed to the gentleman that we had more effectual ground to go upon, and that, by virtue of a statute of the territory, a special session might be called, and wished Esq. Wells to meet me on the fore part of the fourteenth of August for that purpose, at Cincinnati.
August 14. On Saturday, fourteenth, I arrived at Cincinnati with Esq. Gano-waited upon Esq. McMillan, who was in a low state of health; but gave me encouragement that he would be able to sit in session. I immediately despatched a messenger to inform Esq. Wells of my arrival, and another to carry the following letter to General Harmar:
DEAR SIR :-
It has been intimated to me that the persons sanctioned in May term last, to keep public houses of entertainment for the accommodation of strangers and travellers, have abused that indulgence in a.way that must eventually be detrimental to the public service. by debauching the troops under your command with spirituous liquors. I have, there- fore, convened a special session on the occasion, which are now met and ready to proceed on that business; and would therefore thank General Harmar to be so kind as to furnish the session with such evi- dence as may be an effectual clue to go into a thorough investigation of the matter; and, as the session are now convened, your compliance as speedily as may be with conveniency to yourself will greatly oblige, Sir, your most obedient, humble servant,
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