Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Clinton County was founded on June 21, 1839. Clinton County was founded on a basis of adventure, persistence, and trickery, and it all came down to one man—Founder Jerry Church.

Jeremiah Church was born in New York State on September 22, 1796. He was asked to leave school at age thirteen due to an attempt to kiss the teacher, which he later admitted didn’t work out the way he’d planned. He traveled around the country for a while, doing what jobs he could—He worked as a gold miner and a curator in a traveling wax museum. He referred to himself as an “adventurer,” which seems to have fit; during his travels, he had several adventures and incidents with starvation, Native Americans, dangerous weather, and disease. There were several times when he had to play his violin for a few pennies to buy food.

In the fall of 1833, Jerry went to visit his brother Willard in what was then Lycoming County, very near the border with Centre. The two stayed in a local hotel, and Jerry Church fell in love with the land—The river and canals, the mountains. He decided to create a community there, and after raising the money from an anonymous donor, he bought the land and founded Lock Haven.

Almost immediately, he decided to create a new county around his new borough. His reason was interesting—He wanted the local courthouse next door to his home, so he could walk over and sue people anytime he wanted. (Later, in his journal, he admitted that had been a mistake.) Jerry’s home was a small house on Church Street with a tree house on the property. So he came up with a plan to take land from Centre and Lycoming Counties, and make that land into a brand new county: The incredible Eagle County!

That didn’t happen. It stayed Lycoming and Centre, the dividing line running through Flemington. (There’s a story of a wedding in the house that straddled the line, with the bride in one county and the groom in the other.) When he pitched his idea to the state legislature, they basically laughed him off. Nobody wanted to listen to Jerry Church, the crazy town founder who played his violin in a tree. Not that this deterred Jerry; he continued to campaign with the state twice a year, during every winter and summer session, until the summer of 1839.
Not once did it work.

Jerry, undeterred, talked to John Moorhead, another leading local citizen. Now, the thing about Moorhead is that he was disliked, but nobody exactly wanted to put him in charge, either. He kept running for office, and losing, every election. (There’s still guys like this around.) All of his offers of donations were politely declined, including a free new courthouse. His proposal of Dunnstown as a county seat was rejected in favor of Lock Haven.
But Clinton County would not have been founded without him.

Church and Moorhead went together to pitch the idea to the state: Take part of Centre, part of Lycoming, and combine them into one new county. And they changed the name to call it Clinton County, after New York Governor Dewitt Clinton. The territory they were proposing was exactly the same—Only the name was changed.
Damned if that didn’t work for some reason. The state legislature applauded them and voted it through without realizing it was exactly the same plan they’d been rejecting for six years.

That’s how, on June 21, 1839, Clinton County began. The new county government rented the rooms of Barker’s Tavern on Water Street to act as the temporary courthouse, making it pretty easy to convict DUIs, and the county started.