Grant County in 1901

The court took steps at its first meeting to raise funds with which to erect the necessary public buildings and levied a poll tax of $4 on each voter in the county. At that time there were about 350 tithemen in the county. William Arnold was sworn in as Sheriff and Hubbard B. Smith, an uncle of the late Hubbard Smith, was appointed County and Circuit Clerk, to act during his good behavior. The committee named in the act creating the county to locate the county-seat came to the county in June of 1820, and on the regular court of that month, which fell on the 12th, reported to the court that they had viewed many places in the county as a suitable place for the county seat, and had selected the farm of William Arnold, the Sheriff, as the best and most accessible, with more natural advantages. They were, no doubt influenced to make this decision by the liberality of Mr. Arnold, who was an old Revolutionary soldier, to locate the county-seat on his premises. He donated to the county one acre and a half of land for a public square, and upon which to locate the county buildings, and he further obligated himself in writing to furnish to the county and to all persons building in the new county-seat firewood and timber with which to build their home, for a period of 7 years. The report of the Commissioners was accepted and approved by the court, and the new town ordered to be called Philadelphia. The name, however, was of short duration, as at the end of a month it was discovered that there was another town in the state of the same name, and then, in honor of Mr. Arnold, who had done so much to give the new county-seat a start in life, they christened the new town Williamstown.

The first term of the Grant Circuit Court was held at the house of Justice Henry Childers on the 5th day of May, 1820, and all of its business was completed and it adjourned in one day. Three indictments were returned by the grand jury.

The first court house was built by William Arnold at a cost to the county of $2,199, to be paid in three installments. It was a brick building, two stories high, thirty-four feet long, by thirty feet wide. The first floor was twelve feet high and the second floor eight. The lobby was paved with brick, laid closely together in cement. This building served its purpose well and good until 1856, when the present court house was erected and the old one removed.

The first jail in the county was built by Absalom Skirvin. The jail was two stories high, and had two small windows in each story, and it is said that from its confines no prisoner ever escaped. When it was torn down and replaced with a brick, fifty years ago, it was removed to the farm now owned by D. M. Hall, and there its stands yet in fair and reasonable repair, a monument to the skill of our pioneer fathers and the durability of the oaken logs of which it is constructed.

Williamstown at this early date had but three residences, that of William Arnold being the most pretentious. It was located near the present residence of McDuffee heirs. The principal residences of the county extended along the Dry Ridge from Crittenden to Hardscrabble. Almost all of the land in the county was owned by non-residents, and all of it was covered by Virginia patents two or three deep, which in later years gave rise to much land litigation, and gave to the Grant County bar a fame throughout the state for the ability and shrewdness of her land lawyers. Louis Myers, who has been called to his reward these many years, was known all over Kentucky as a land grabber, and had in his life time more than a hundred suits in the courts of Grant County alone to test the title to some of the many acres of Grant County he acquired under a dubious or clouded deed. While Mr. Myers was always at law with somebody about the title to a tract of land, he was much beloved by the citizens of the county, and represented them in the Legislature as many as four times.

At this early date one of the objects of note in the county was a large poplar tree that stood near the Baptist Church, now the railroad depot at Dry Ridge. It was nine feet in diameter and it magnificent trunk and branches, towering high about the surrounding. Before it was cut down in 1831, it was known far and near as "the big tree". Another object of note was "the poison spring" situated just north of the village of Sherman on the Newt Kendall farm. The family of Joseph Wheeler, living at the farm now occupied by Joseph Wayland, used the water out of this spring, all taking sick and dying from some cause unknown to them; but since supposed to have been "milk sickness." Many believed that it was the water from the spring that killed them, and hence it took the name of the "poison spring," and for many years it was regarded by the more superstitious and less enlightened people as a dangerous and even fatal place.

The pioneers of Grant County were a sturdy people of a prolific stock and from the day the county was organized it began to grow in numbers and wealth. One of the most historic events of the early days was the passing through the county of the Marquis de Lafayette. He made a tour of the United States in 1824, and came to Kentucky in company with the Post-Master General, Honorable W. T. Barry. On his return from Lexington he passed through Williamstown, remaining over night as the guest of William Arnold, whom he had known as an officer in the war of the Revolution, and who received a severe wound at the battle of Yorktown.

Grant County has continued to grow in wealth and people during all of the eighty-one years of her history. She has met with few calamities and no reverses. From a population of less than 1,200 in 1820 she has grown to 18, 945, as shown by the census taken last June. From her poverty she has grown rich, showing a tax duplicate of approximately $5,000,000, and from a tithe list of 350 she has increased to a tithe list of 3,600. From the rude log cabin in which the pioneers found their homes and raised their families she has progressed to costly, comfortable and well built homes in every part of her territory. From no roads at all and hardly a bridle path that could be called a trail, she can boast at the beginning of the new century of 500 miles of as good macadam turnpike roads as can be found in the South. These roads were all built by taxation, and are today free and in good repair. They represent an investment of almost, if not quite, $1,000,000. She now has a school house on every hill, a church spire pointing to the sky in every neighborhood and her people are moral, industrious and God fearing. Magnificent iron bridges span her water courses.

Twice in her history has Grant County been visited by the bubonic plague, and twice have her home been desolated and her people made to weep for loved ones lost. The first time that cholera made it appearance was in 1832, and its ravages were not staid until many homes were made desolate; again in 1854 this dread monster came and drew his loathsome trail across the doorsteps of some of our best people.

The Grant County of today is a purely agricultural county. It is made up of lovely hills and valleys. The magnificent forest of eighty years ago has fallen beneath the woodman's axe and even the stumps have disappeared. The county contains within its limits almost two hundred thousand acres of land. It is all of limestone foundation with clay formation and a deep black loom covering the clay. There is not, and never was, an acre of naturally poor land in the county. Lying north of Williamstown, and extending to the Boone and Kenton County lines, a distance of eleven miles, and lying on both sides of the Dry Ridge with an average width of from five to ten miles is a scope of country as fine as can be found in any state in the Union. It is covered with fine farms and fine homes. Its blue grass fields are rich in riotous luxury and fine short horns, fine southdown sheep, fine horses, cattle and mules grow into money, while the owners of the soil enjoy the blessing of life. The finest tobacco barns in the work grace that section of the country. The greatest revenue producer in the cereal line in Grant County is the tobacco crop. White burley is grown exclusively, and last year over 6,000,000 pounds was produced and it was sold at an average price of six cents per pound, bringing into the county in actual cash $3000.000.

There has been very little emigration to Grant County since the Civil War. A few Germans of the better class and a few Irish have made up all of the emigrants who have come amongst us. Our people are to "the manor born." Ninety percent of all the people who live in Grant County today were born within the confines of the county. They are sturdy blue-eyed, Anglo-Saxon race. The Grant County boy has wandered, however, all over the world. There is not a state in the Union in which one or more is not located, and wherever you find a Grant County boy who has become a prodigal son it is not in the sense of wasting his substance, he is growing rich or at least bettering his condition on foreign soil. Almost a company of Grant County boys are fighting for the flag in the Philippines, some are in China and Cuba, Porto Rico and the Hawaiian Island.

The county indebtedness of Grant County is $120,000.00. The tax rate is this year 65 cents on the $100. The county has one of the best record office in the state, built at an expense in 1882 of $15,000. It is a handsome building of brick and stone with steel vaults. The courthouse is about fifty years old. The present county jail was erected twelve years ago, and is a fine ornate building of brick, with freestone trimmings, two stories high, with steel cages for prisoners. It was built at an expense of $14,000. The county infirmary was built three years ago and is a good one. The county owns the farm on which it stands, of 150 acres, and paid $50 per acre for it. The buildings cost $7,000 and are new and up-to-date. The infirmary is run on the cooperative plan. Everything belongs to the county; provision and farm products are raised on the farm, the inmates and keeper's family are supplied and the residue sold. Under the present management it is thought within two or three years the institution will be self-sustaining.

In the city of Williamstown there were only three houses in 1820 and they were farm houses and widely scattered. The town was first called Philadelphia, later re-christened Williamstown. The growth of the county seat even after its selection as the county seat was slow and painful. In 1822 there were twenty-five acres of land condemned by Mr. Arnold for the town of Williamstown which was surveyed and laid off in one-fourth acre lots. William Arnold, James Collins, William Littell, Wesley Williams, Samuel Williams, Thomas Watson and Absalom Skirvin were appointed its first Board of Trustees. Several small wooden houses were shortly thereafter erected in the town. The merchant had come and a new era had dawned upon our pioneer fathers.

The growth of Williamstown contains no event of special significance until 1856. At that time there had been erected a row of wooden buildings on either side of Main Street, and there was scarcely a brick building to be seen in the town. A child of Samuel Marksberry was amusing himself in the basement of his father's house by learning some combustible material when the building took fire. The house stood where Alvin Lowe's grocery stands now. The flames spread up and down the street destroying every house and tenement on the west side from where E. T. Cram's grocery now stands to Mill Street, and the east side from J. H. Webb's store to the residence of Mrs. Lutie Hogan. This was the first fatal disaster to the new town and in a very few hours thirty-five families were rendered homeless. The people, however were not discouraged, money was made up for the suffers at home and in Georgetown, Lexington and Frankfort, and the burnt district was rebuilt in substantial frame and brick buildings. In 1864 the town was again partially destroyed by fire and again the spirit of improvement rebuilt with better and more substantial buildings, and in 1867 another disastrous fire swept away a part of the town, including the flouring mill of Cunningham and Harrison. They rebuilt a splendid brick mill and then the town hall, now known as the Odd Fellow's Temple.

No other disastrous fires occurred in Williamstown until some ten years ago when a fire fiend or fire-bug took it into his head to burn the town; but the volunteer fire company in every instance confined the flames to the building in which the fire originated.These fires brought about the purchase of a first-class fire engine and the organization of the present fire department. At the present Williamstown is fairly well protected from the flames. She has a good volunteer fire department; W. G. O'Hara is the fire chief.

Suffice to say Williamstown has six white churches and one colored and one of the best Graded Free Schools with a high school department in the state. The population of Williamstown as shown by the last census is not large, being only 613, but this is largely accounted for from the fact that her corporate limits are very much contracted. It has been fifty years since her boundaries have been enlarged and at least half of the population of the town is outside of the corporate limits. It would be amiss to say that the real population of Williamstown exceeds twelve hundred souls. There is no better town in the state and may she live long and prosper!

Williamstown Courier, May 30, 1901
Reprinted September 1981 by The Grant County Historical Society

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