MOUNT VERNON — A. Banning Norton’s early history of Knox County delights in personal anecdotes, and few are better than Benjamin Butler’s story about how he engineered the unlikely acension of Mount Vernon to county seat.
Before we tell that tale, though, a word of praise for the now-forgotten Samuel Smith. Smith was an industrious New Englander who was one of the first settlers on the ground in Knox County. Norton contrasted Smith to the other settlers who also arrived early:
“While these plain men from Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are preparing their cabins for comfortable occupation, and making little clearings, a stray Yankee, solitary and alone, with a speculative eye and money-making disposition, is, with pocket compass, taking his bearings through the forest, soliloquizing about the chance of making a fortune by laying out a town and selling lots to those who may come after him….”
Smith laid out a plot for the town of Clinton, registered it, and started selling lots before most other settlers had even unpacked their wagons. When Smith built, he didn’t build a cabin, but instead a full two-story brick house. And he opened what is reputed to have been the first tavern in Knox County.
This head-start made Clinton the heavy favorite to be designated the county seat, especially as its neighbor down the hill, Mount Vernon, was a “damned little scrubby place,” where the tree stumps hadn’t even been removed from the streets by the time Knox was declared a county in 1808.
Clinton was a much more impressive village, even though Smith had gotten in a little trouble with the state for running his tavern before he even had a license. He had been so eager to get up and running, he hadn’t even inquired about regulations. One of the county’s first lawsuits, then, was against Smith.
He simply pled guilty, paid his $2.50 fine, and kept serving up the drinks, now with a liquor license.
In addition to Smith’s house and tavern, the village had several fine wooden houses and a large mill owned by Bill Douglass. Fredericktown had Johnny Kerr’s mill and some rich Quaker houses, and was thus regarded as the second choice for county seat.
But when a group of Mount Vernon’s founders considered the situation, one of them had an idea.
“I said to them that I had studied out a pretty damned bad trick that I could manage if they would only go into it,” Butler later said when interviewed by Banning for the history book. “And if they wouldn’t, there wasn’t a damned bit of chance for us.”
Butler’s listeners were intrigued. His idea was that each of them would give $10 — a large sum in those days — and that this money would be used to buy liquor for the local lowlifes. The plan was to get the rowdies drunk and then send them up to “fiddle and fight and play hell generally” when the state commissioners arrived to observe Clinton.
Meanwhile, Butler also put up a yoke of oxen to help pull the tree stumps out of Mount Vernon’s downtown streets, and said that everyone else would have to pledge to be seen working on the roads, weeding their gardens, and cooking some choice victuals for the traveling commissioners.
The settlers agreed that it was a fine plan. Butler was especially delighted to recall that the Methodist minister, Rev. Kratzer, didn’t even say anything against the devious scheme.
When the commissioners arrived late in the day, the plan went into motion. The officials stayed overnight and were fed richly both supper and breakfast the following morning. By the time they got on the road, they were amazed to see the hard-working citizens of Mount Vernon out working on the roads, hoeing their gardens, and doing all sorts of work. They were impressed.
“Don’t you think this might be a good town for the county seat?” one of the commissioners asked Benjamin Butler.
“Oh, we’re just poor, hard-working people,” Butler said disingenuously. “We’re too poor to even apply for it.”
The commissioners decided to ride up and check out Clinton and Fredericktown.
The other part of the plan had already been set in motion. When the commissioners arrived in Clinton, they found a fiddler playing in the street for drunken dancers. When they stopped at Samuel Smith’s tavern, a knot of fighting, cussing men came staggering through the door, swinging punches right and left, egged on by spectators.
The commissioners promptly got back on their horses and prepared to leave. By this time, Samuel Smith had been informed who the horsemen were, and he tried to flag them down and get them to stay, but they said they’d stop on their way back from Fredericktown.
In Fredericktown, the commissioners found more of the same drunken lawlessness in progress. The commissioners were shocked. They asked Butler, who had innocently accompanied them, why these villages were so much more rough-and-tumble than Mount Vernon.
“I told them that about Clinton and Frederick there were a great many rich men’s sons,” Butler said, “and they had no trades, and would frolic a little just to put in their time.”
He said absolutely nothing to push Mount Vernon as a candidate. His poker face worked. By the end of the day, the state commissioners had decided that Mount Vernon was the only proper choice to be county seat, and they would not hear any arguments against it.
Smith and others later petitioned the state to reconsider, but the state declined, and Mount Vernon became the seat of power. Clinton itself gradually declined until it was later absorbed by Mount Vernon, becoming the northern edge of the town.
Smith himself had one other claim to fame: he was the founder of the area’s first Masonic lodge, Mt. Zion Lodge No. 9, F. & A. M. The picture of Smith I located was run in the Democratic Banner in March of 1911, when the picture was installed in the lodge as a portrait of its founder.
For years, the lodge had no image of Smith, but by chance, one of its members crossed paths with Smith’s grandson in Toledo, and they were given a small portait of Smith, from which this larger portrait was made.
So, Samuel Smith got outmaneuvered on the county seat. But he had plenty of other successes in his long life, and we’ll salute him for all those with a glass of grog from his properly licensed tavern.
