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On September 8, 1803, the year that Ohio became a state, the Associate Judges of Franklin County ordered that a road be constructed “leading from the Public Square in Franklinton to Springfield, Greene County.” This road came to be known as The Old State Road or Ludlow’s Road. On this spot in the summer of 1822, the Village of New Hampton was laid out, the road being Main Street of the village. New Hampton was the forerunner of West Jefferson. It fell into oblivion eight to nine years later when West Jefferson was developed along the National Road. All that remains of New Hampton is the cemetery and this part of the road.
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Judge William H. West of Bellefontaine led a distinguished career in law, public service, and politics. In 1854 West helped found the Republican party in Ohio and six years later he participated in Abraham Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency. West served consecutive terms in both houses of Ohio’s General Assembly from 1857 to 1865 and was elected the state’s attorney general at the end of the Civil War. He became an Ohio Supreme Court justice in 1871 and in 1877 was his party’s nominee for governor. After losing his sight, Judge West retired from the court but continued to practice law. At the Republican party’s convention in 1884, the “Blind Man Eloquent” nominated James G. Blaine as the G.O.P.’s presidential candidate. Defining Republicans as a party for “union, freedom, humanity, and progress,” the judge’s nomination speech sparked a celebration that historian David McCullough described as “one of the most memorable events in the whole history of national political conventions.”
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In the late 1790s General Benjamin Whiteman built near this site one of the first log cabins in Alpha, the first settlement in what would become Beavercreek Township of Greene County. The cabin, later owned by Whiteman’s father-in-law, Owen Davis, and leased for use as a tavern to Peter Borders, became the first courthouse of Greene County. Twenty-five feet square, it had one room below and a chamber above, serving as the family sleeping quarters. A small ladder through a hole in the ceiling reached the upper level. The building was constructed of burr oak logs with a roof made of clapboards held in place by long poles laid across them. Considered to be one of the finest houses in that part of the county, the cabin had one door, one window, and a huge fireplace with an outside chimney built of sticks, stones, and clay. (Continued on other side)
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This nation’s landmark case on the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures began in Cuyahoga County. In 1967, for the first time in history, African-Americans both argued and heard a case at the U.S. Supreme Court. Defense attorney Louis Stokes and assistant prosecutor Reuben Payne debated limits on police searches before the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. The Supreme Court held that Officer Martin McFadden’s frisk and seizure of guns from suspects on Euclid Avenue about to rob a jewelry store was constitutional. They upheld Cuyahoga County Appellate Court Judges Joseph Silbert, Joseph Artl, and J.J.P. Corrigan and adopted the rule trial Judge Bernard Friedman issued: Police may search for weapons if they have a reasonable suspicion that a suspect is armed and dangerous.
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