Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Recently, I wrote a column about some of the random buildings in Clinton County. I mentioned the courthouse, and said that there had been either two or four courthouses, depending on your level of pickiness. I didn’t explain it much more than that, because our courthouses are basically a column all on their own.

Most people are familiar with the most recent two: The Jerry Church Courthouse and the current one. (When I say “most recent,” I am referring to everything past the 1840s here. Everything’s relative.) Unless you read a lot of my columns or come on my tours, though, you might not be familiar with the other two.

Clinton County was founded in 1839 by Jerry Church. His goal was to have a county created with Lock Haven as the county seat so he could have the courthouse next door to his home, enabling him to sue his neighbors conveniently. (This sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m not.) The county was first created on June 21, 1839.

Any county needs a government, and a place to operate. This is the courthouse. Right at the beginning, John Moorhead offered us one.

A bit about John Moorhead. He was friends with Jerry Church, and he tried running for some offices. He never quite got the votes. Nobody disliked him, but nobody wanted to put him in charge. So, when he built a courthouse on Main Street and offered it, free of charge, to the newly-elected county commissioners, they turned him down. Instead, they said, they wanted to go with a courthouse on land that the much more charming Jerry Church had donated on Church Street. And they hired Moorhead to design and build the new one.

But in the meantime, they still needed some sort of base of operations. So they rented out Barker’s Tavern on East Water Street.

R.R. Barker owned a tavern there. The tavern part was allowed to continue—Walking into the place, you’d find drinks on one side, and court operations on the other. This made it efficient to convict DUIs. Upstairs, they rented a couple of rooms for government operations. One was for the county commissioners. The other was to be shared by the prothonotary, clerk of courts, and register and recorder. It may sound a bit crowded, but actually it was a private office, because all of these positions were initially held by one guy, Philip Krebs.

Krebs was born in 1789 in Montgomery County, and came to Lock Haven when it was first founded. He took one, pretty much, the entire role of government in those early days, acting as most of the offices that needed to be held day-to-day. So he had his upstairs office to himself.

The first sheriff, John Miller, could have had an office in the tavern, but chose not to. Instead he preferred to tuck all outstanding warrants in the brim of his hat, and wander off to do his job at large.

The Barker’s Tavern Courthouse lasted until the Jerry Church Courthouse was finished, about where Robb Elementary School now stands. By this time, Jerry had changed his mind about suing people; he wrote that the more a person stayed out of court, the happier they’d be. That courthouse lasted a little over twenty years, when it needed work and they chose to build a new one.

And that’s the current one. Completed in 1867, it was made from stone shipped in from Farrandsville. The current courthouse is still in use after a century and a half. And it bears a striking resemblance to the Venango County Courthouse….But that’s another column, too.