HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY                          21

could not be charged to any one. The board then took immediate steps
to rebuild upon the same ground, the announcement of their decision and
purpose meeting with vehement opposition and protests on the part of
citizens and tax-payers in different parts of the county, who filed petitions,
praying for delay until the county at large could be heard from on the
propriety of such procedure. However, the board of commissioners
proceeded to have plans and specifications prepared and to advertise for
bids in the Indianapolis and Terre Haute papers for the letting of a con-
tract, as there was then no paper printed and published in the county.
At an early date in the succeeding year (1852) the contract was awarded
to William K. Houston, Samuel Miles, Joseph R. Kennedy and Oliver
Cromwell, all of Bowling Green, for the building of another two-story
brick, about the size of the former one, substantially on the same founda-
tion, at a cost of $11,000. This house was not occupied until the latter
part of 1853, and is still standing. During the interval of two years,
court was held in an upper room of the three-story frame business house
on the north side of the square, until the completion of the Masonic build-
ing, when the sessions were held in the new hall above, and all the county
officers transacted their official business in the middle room below.
    The relocation and removal of the seat of justice from Bowling Green
to a more central point, west of Eel river, had been agitated as far back
in our history as 1838, when the public became elated over the prospects
of navigation by means of the side-cuts and feeders tributary to the old
Wabash and Erie canal. There were prominent citizens of Bowling
Green, of a speculative turn of mind, who favored the movement, among
them Samuel Howe Smydth and John Osborn. Smydth, a brilliant and
rising young lawyer, who had acquired real estate interests at the Feeder
Dam, took an active part in laying out a town on the west side of the
river at this point,, in 1838, which he named New Amsterdam. This
town was an intended prospective county seat. Smydth was an ambi-
tious and energetic young man and went to the legislature just at this time,
probably with the view of facilitating and furthering his county seat
project, but failing health compelled him to abandon its prosecution. In
July of the same year, Osborn platted a town on the Lower Bloomington
road, less than a mile east of the present town of Ashboro, on land then
owned by himself, but afterward known as the Tribble farm, which he
named Jonesboro, also a candidate for county seat honors, presumably
a practically central location. A public sale of lots was made here, as
Was the usage then, but, from some cause, the movement was soon
abandoned, notwithstanding Mr. Osborn’s election to the legislature the
following year. But the building of the first brick court house, in 1839-40,
had the effect to allay the agitation of this question for the period of
eleven years—until the burning of the court house, when, as has been
already said, the first formidable organized., effort was made by those
favorable to relocation. In February, 1852, A. H. L. Baker founded the
town of Bellaire, intended as a rival in some future county-seat removal
contest.
    Under the old constitution, relocations of county-seats were granted
and removals ordered by the general assembly of the state on petitions
direct from the people. Then, too, the general assembly met annually on
the first Monday of December. As a significant co-incidence, the session
of 1851-52 convened on the same day that the board of county commis-
sioners met to take action on the loss of the court house. At this junc-