Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I love Clinton County’s history. I mean, I love it all. Every year, every public figure. It all weaves itself into an elaborate tapestry that I write about, week after week.

If pressed, though, I have to admit I have a favorite era. Most of all, I love discovering and writing about the earliest days—The days when Jerry Church founded Lock Haven in 1833, and then Clinton County in 1839. There are so many worthwhile stories in those years, just some fascinating, fun stuff.

Recently, in an old newspaper, I discovered a short article that details the first documents ever filed in the county courthouse. I am captivated by this kind of thing, which is why my family always seems to have this glazed-over look. The article was in an anniversary edition of the newspaper in 1939, when the county turned a hundred years old. I decided to write a column about it, which at six hundred words is likely to be longer than the source material.

Before I start, a little bit about the courthouse. It’s no big secret that Clinton County was founded on June 21, 1839 from parts of Lycoming and Centre Counties. (Or maybe it is a big secret, to you. I don’t know your life.) A lot of people think that the county governments shuffled through everything and sent all the papers where they belonged, figuring out which documents pertained to which areas, but that’s not true. Lycoming and Centre kept what they had, and Clinton started fresh.

These papers would have been filed in a tavern. Odd, but true. Clinton County has had either two courthouses or four, depending on your interpretation. The first one was Barker’s Tavern, on East Water Street in Lock Haven.

With their newly-formed county, the commissioners needed a place to do business, so they rented out most of the tavern, leaving only the actual bar in business. This served them until 1840, when a new courthouse was built. Local man John Moorhead built a nice building and offered it as a courthouse, but the commissioners declined, instead building one on land that Jerry Church donated—The site of present-day Robb Elementary School. This served until the late 1860s, when the current courthouse was built, and if you’re not familiar with it, you need to get out more.

So these documents would have been drafted and filed in the Barker’s Tavern courthouse, soon after the founding of the county. The first court was held in December of 1839, but they’d already been hard at work filing papers. The earliest entry in the county is from Deed Book A, still on file in the Piper Building. It was dated October 26, 1839, and is Associate Judge Commission from Governor David R. Porter to John Fleming and George Crawford. (On a practical level, I have no idea what this means. I’m not a lawyer.)

Soon after, the same two men were given the power to administer oaths, as well as Philip Krebs, who deserved it. Krebs was pretty much our entire government in those early days; he served simultaneously as Prothonotary, Clerk of Courts, and Register and Recorder.

The first actual deed recorded in Clinton County was from earlier than that, though—July 19, 1839. It was a land sale from Isaac McKinney to Philip S. Gray, for some land in Bald Eagle Township, itself the oldest township in Clinton County.

Those documents were, essentially, the beginning of our county business, which would stretch over the centuries and involve thousands more documents and millions of people. Hell, my own deed is in there somewhere, among all the others. All of the courthouse files: The deeds, the criminal records, trial transcripts, marriage records, wills, all kept on file for almost two hundred years. No wonder I’m so fascinated by this county.