Early History of Wood County and Its Courthouses

Wood County, Ohio, was established by the Ohio legislature on February 12, 1820. The county was named for Colonel Eleazer Darby Wood, an engineering officer in the army of General (and later, U.S. president) William Henry Harrison. Colonel Wood was responsible for building Fort Meigs, an important defense post during the War of 1812 which was located near the town of Perrysburg, in the northern part of the county. The first county commission was elected April 1, 1820, and held an organizing meeting on April 12 in the town of Miami Rapids (now Maumee).

The first session of the Wood County Court of Common Pleas was held May 3, 1820, in Miami Rapids. The courtroom was the second floor of a local store. According to an article by Charles W. Evers, a journalist who was well-known for his interest in local history, in a Special Edition of the Bowling Green Daily Sentinel on September 29, 1896:

There were no jury rooms, so when a case went to the jury, the judges would take a recess, go to the tavern, smoke and tell stories with the lawyers, thus leaving the jury the use of the court room to make up its verdict in. The grand jury had to shift for itself, in some room outside; or, if it were sunny weather, under the shade of some neighboring tree.

The First County Courthouse

In 1823, the county seat was moved to Perrysburg, and the first county courthouse was built by contractors Daniel Hubbell and Guy Nearing. Evans' article in the Bowling Green Daily Sentinel said the first courthouse cost $895 to construct, and was financed "largely from the proceeds of the sale of lots donated to the county by the United States government." The article continued:

The building. . . stood on Front street, south side, about 200 feet or so west of Louisiana avenue intersection on lot 337. It was a plain, substantial two-story structure, about 24x32 feet, with offices on the first floor, and court room, entered by outside stairway, on second floor. . . . The accompanying illustration gives a fair representation of the building except the roof, which was of shingles riven out of white oak timber, cut close by, and shaved into proper shape by hand with a drawing knife.

They were known as "lap" shingles and laid one foot to the weather; the lath used were also riven out of green oak by hand, with a tool called a "flow." The lumber, of walnut and poplar, was hauled from Leamigs mill on Swan creek on Monclova; the chimney brick, from across the Maumee at Hubbel's yard in Miami.

Evers also noted that "the rude log jail which had been removed from Maumee" was located behind the court house. Evers reported that while the courthouse was under construction, "court was held in a spare room in Frank Hollister's house at Orleans, on the river slope below Fort Meigs." The first courthouse was used from 1823 until 1836 when, according to Evers, "the people of Perrysburg grew ambitious for something more suitable to the growing needs of the county."

The size of Wood County had changed in 1835. The original borders of the county extended northward to the Ohio/Michigan state line. However, the area north of the Maumee River was designated as Lucas County in 1835, after the "Toledo War," a border dispute between Ohio and Michigan that developed when the Miami-Erie Canal was being built, and both states wanted to be the location for the terminating point of the canal. Although both states called out their militia, the dispute eventually was settled by President Andrew Jackson, without military action. Ohio became the location for the canal, but Michigan gained its upper peninsula as part of the settlement.

The Second County Courthouse

In July 1836, the Wood County commissioners decided to build a new courthouse on the corner of Walnut Street and Indiana Avenue in Perrysburg. Evers reported that the commissioners appropriated $10,000 of "surplus revenue" to build the new structure and added, "What this 'surplus' revenue consisted of or whence it came does not appear." According to Evers' account:

It is safe to say the building which was well put up, looked well architecturally, as the accompanying illustration shows, cost in all not less than $20,000, a large sum for Wood county at that time. . . .

For over thirty years that court room was not only a temple of justice for the county, but served the people of Perrysburg for miscellaneous meetings of all sorts. Within the walls of that building were sheltered the offical records of every detail in the county's beginning. Every road, bridge, school, township, court, jury, election, or move of whatever kind in the advancing settlement has some trace of record.

The second courthouse was a Roman-Doric style two-story brick building on a stone foundation, with four two-story columns and a cupola. The contractors, Loomis Brigham and Jairus Curtis, began work in 1837 and the courthouse was completed in 1842.

A New County Seat

After the Civil War, county residents began a lengthy dispute over the best location for the county seat. Perrysburg, located at the extreme northern edge of the county, was not preferred by war veterans and other politically influential citizens who lived in the southern part of the county and had to travel across portions of the ridges and sand hills of the "Black Swamp" in order to conduct county business in Perrysburg. Centrally-located communities, including Bowling Green, contended to become the county seat, and several elections, legislative enactments, and court battles ensued. C. W. Evers reported:

After an animated canvas, a vote was taken at the general election, October, 1866, which resulted in a majority of about 400 votes for removal to Bowling Green. The Perrysburg people, who had not fully awakened to the danger until a few days before election, were astounded at the result and their chagrin was almost beyond measure. Bowling Green at this time was only a road village with no railroad and scarely five hundred inhabitants and at the onset of the move, few, except the most sanguine, expected the vote for removal would carry.

The Perrysburg advocates claimed fraud in the election, and began a contest of the vote in the courts, also another suit by injunction, in which the constitutionality of the enabling act was attacked. The removal interests had entered into a bond prior to the vote, to build at Bowling Green, free of expense to the county, a court house as good as the one at Perrysburg, if the vote carried. By the spring of 1868 the court cases had gone so far in their favor, that the removal people decided it was safe to go on with the building, and on the 4th of July the corner stone of WOOD COUNTY'S THIRD COURT HOUSE was laid with formal ceremonies.

The Third County Courthouse

The new courthouse built in 1868 in Bowling Green was located on the same site as the current Wood County courthouse, between Summit and Prospect Streets, facing south on Court Street. The construction did not have a contractor, but work was supervised by superindendent Norton Reed, with A. M. Wycoff as master carpenter and Hubbard [no first name given] in charge of masonry. The brick was made locally at A. K. Vail's kiln. Architecturally, the 1868 structure was modeled after the courthouse in Perrysburg, although Evers noted:

Its cupola was different, it had an iron instead of a wood cornice, and in order to make more room, the columns were dispensed with, and the projecting five feet in the old one were thrown within the walls in the new.

Its subdivisions for offices, there being three on each side of a twelve foot hall, were similar to the old ones, there being no office provision for surveyor or prosecutor. The cost of the building, paid mostly by subscription, was about $23,000.

A new jail also was built in 1868 on the same property as the courthouse, again using materials and architecture similar to the jail at the former county seat in Perrysburg. Contractors for the jail were S. L. Boughton and A. A. Thurstin.

County Seat Controversy Continues

Although court activities started to take place in Bowling Green in 1869, Perrysburg did not give up the fight to remain the county seat. One lawsuit claimed that people had been tricked into voting to move the county seat. Perrysburg advocates said that the commissioners had been bribed by the 32 Bowling Green residents who signed a pre-election bond agreeing to pay for construction of a new courthouse and jail, at no cost to the county, in exchange for the rights to the old courthouse and jail in Perrysburg. The Perrysburg advocates also claimed that voters had been given fraudulent information that the old courthouse had structural decay and would cost more than $100,000 to renovate. The Ohio State Supreme Court dismissed this suit in 1869, and upheld the 2532 to 2123 vote to move the courthouse to Bowling Green. The bond-holders eventually received the Perrysburg building, valued at $25,000. However, Perrysburg advocates still did not give up their quest. Evers reported:

In October, 1875, a vote was taken, on the petition of Perrysburg, to remove the county seat back to that place. The canvas was exciting and at fever heat by election day. It was dotted all along with funny episodes loaded sometimes with so much bitterness and hostility as to threaten family ties in the contending ranks. It was a remarkable canvass, one never to be forgotten by those who took part in it. Perrysburg lost again after a great fight, by some 1800 majority. Of course litigation followed. The story of those two contests would be an interesting one to the contestants if it could all be truthfully told. It never will be. The smoke of conflict cleared away years ago and many of the gallant men and women (both sexes took part) on both sides have passed to their last rest. The living, like sensible people, long since smoked the pipe of peace, gave the hand of former friendship and unitedly work side by side now, for the best interests of all.

Evers ended his 1896 report by noting that the second Wood County courthouse was destroyed by a fire in 1872. However, Evers said the "old wooden structure" of the first courthouse was still standing, showing "even yet a vigorous, youthful appearance" which "bids fair to contest the ravages of time with the costly new stone edifice just completed by the county."

According to another Bowling Green journalist and local historian, Paul W. Jones, writing in the Bowling Green Sentinel Tribune on October 5, 1996, the site of the second courthouse in Perrysburg now is the Perrysburg Municipal Building. The site of the original log courthouse is now the back of Houck's Drug Store in Perrysburg.