You won’t find a copy of Leonard F. Dean’s book on the shelves alongside Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason or Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series, but Mark Pace said Dean’s
Courthouses and Courts of Early Granville County, NC is somewhat of a detective story.
Dean’s book tracks down the origins of the court system – and the first courthouses – in old Granville County, and Mark Pace and Bill Harris said it reads more like a detective story than a rehash of researched facts.
The early courts of Granville County was the topic for the tri-weekly history program on Thursday’s Town Talk. They kicked off the discussion with a quick review of Dean’s book.
“It sounds dry, but it’s really quite good,” Harris said of Dean’s book. Pace agreed, calling Dean a “meticulous researcher…who makes his arguments and backs them up with facts.”
“It’s an interesting story from an interesting time,” Pace said.
The courthouse in downtown Oxford is beautiful and an iconic structure in its own right, but the 1838 structure wasn’t the first official courthouse in Granville County – that was located up near Eaton’s Ferry in the northeastern part of what is now Warren County.
Granville County, remember, used to encompass all of what is now Vance, Granville, Franklin and Warren counties. That area around present-day Eaton’s Ferry was more heavily populated than other areas – folks moved from southside Virginia into that area, Pace said.
As the population continued to grow in other parts of Granville County, people who had business at the courthouse had to travel longer distances to get to the courthouse in Eaton’s Ferry.
But it was Col. William Eaton – considered by many to be the father of Granville County – who helped to change that. Eaton owned the property where the court was located up in the northeastern part of present-day Warren County. And he also offered a more centralized property farther south, which he also owned, on which to locate a court that wouldn’t take so long to get to from the south.
This property, known as Locust Hill, is located on Ruin Creek in present-day Vance County. And it was here where the “new” courthouse conducted business, from processing applications for taverns and canneries to hearing court proceedings and naturalizing citizens. Although there was no actual courthouse, court was convened here. Pace said Eaton also ran a tavern and a store, which benefitted from the additional court traffic.
In 1764, Samuel Benton introduced legislation to move the county seat to his plantation, “Oxford” and gave the land on where the current Granville County courthouse stands.
Benton, a member of the House of Commons, owned all the adjacent property around the parcel he offered for the courthouse, from which the town of Oxford grew.
Call Pace at the North Carolina Room of Richard Thornton library at 919.693.1121 to learn more about how to get a copy of Dean’s book.