MONTGOMERY COUNTY OHIO - BIO: HOLT, Hon. George B. 
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Taken from: Sluff of History's Boot Soles  - An Anecdotal History of
Dayton's Bench and Bar, by David C. Greer, pg. 38-39, Orange Frazer
Press, 1996.

"The First Half Century


George B. Holt came west with Stoddard and was also from Connecticut.
He arrived in Dayton in 1819 and joined the circuit-riding pioneer
lawyers and judges of the era. He died in 1871 and at his death was,
like Judge Crane, a poor man-a condition which, without intended offense
to Henry Stoddard, the old historians describe as "the highest evidence
of the honesty of his public, and the purity of his private life." His
character was a balanced mix of nature and nurture-he had a native
adroitness and shrewdness and, while he didn't keep up on his reading,
he had been a well-truined student. He followed Judge Crane onto the
common pleas bench in 1828, serving as judge for a total of fourteen
years from 1828 to 1836 and from 1843 to 1849. In the interim between
these terms the judgeship was held by William L. Helfenstein, a
painstaking, upright man who had come to Dayton from Pennsylvania and
left Dayton for New York after serving his judgeship. In 1850 Judge Holt
was followed on the bench by John Beers of Greenville. Beers moved into
the Old Courthouse when it replaced the small brick building of 1807.

The dockets of the early courts reflected the society of the time.
Disputes over water rights, land boundaries, and contracts were common
features of the court's business, and there were numerous criminal cases
that seem relatively minor by today's standards but were handled at the
time with all the nice distinctions and technical quibbles that the law
could devise. Judge Holt presided over a notable larceny case in which
the victim was robbed while sleeping off a drinking bout. It had been a
cold, wet night, and the victim had curled up in a fence comer. There
wasn't much question over the fact that the defendant had lifted the
victim's property, but leamed defense counsel conceived a factual and
legal argument with which he parried off the sword ofjustice. The
evidence demonstrated that a sudden drop in temperature had frozen the
victim's clothing fast to the ground before the property had been
lifted. This fact, argued defense counsel, converted the offense from
larceny to trespass since a well-established principle of the law held
that nothing attached to the freehold could be the subject of larceny
and that the taking of anything attached to the freehold constituted a
trespass, an offense with which the defendant had not been charged.
Under the practice of the day, the judge in his instructions had a large
degree of freedom in commenting on the evidence, and Judge Holt told the
jury that while the rule cited by the defense counsel could not be
disputed, the rule was, in the court's opinion, inapplicable to the case
at bar. The jury disagreed and found the defendant not guilty, providing
the defendant's counsel with a reputation for brilliance and serving as
a waming that drunks shouldn't sleep on the ground on cold, wet nights.

In addition to fourteen years of attempting to untie such Gordian
knots in the courtroom, Judge Holt was elected as representative in the
state legislature in 1824 and as a state senator in 1828. During the two
years before his legislative service he had established and published a
weekly democratic newspaper called the Miand Republican and Dayton
Advertiser. While in the legislature he participated in the passage of
laws which established the ad valorem system of taxation and the common
school system of Ohio. He was also chairman of the Senate Committee on
Internal Improvements and involved in the passage of the canal law,
which proved a great boon to Dayton's economy. After leaving the bench
Judge Holt gravitated toward his second, and favorite, occupation of
gardening and stock breeding. While he lived until the ripe age of
eighty-two and saw from the sanctuary of his farm the country's struggle
through the Civil War and Reconstruction, he only had two more
significant encounters with the law and politics. In 1850 he became
involved in a hot and bitter contest with young Clement Vallandigharn
for nomination to the convention that was being held to adopt a new
constitution for Ohio. He received the nomination and served with
distinction in that historic convention, but Vallandigham opposed his
election and repudiated the action of the convention. Holt later
retaliated by successfully opposing Vallandigham's first candidacy for
Congress in a notable paper entitled "The Bolter Bolted."