Happy Birthday, Lorain County: Commissioners, courts celebrate 200 years

"Happy birthday to a place we all call home." That was the greeting offered by Lorain County Bicentennial Committee Vice Chairman Garry Gibbs on Friday in his welcome remarks to open a special historical program and meeting of the county Board of Commissioners celebrating the 200th anniversary of the formation of Lorain County and its original Board of Commissioners in 1824. The day's initial festivities took place on the steps of the old Lorain County Courthouse on Second Street in downtown Elyria, before the county's jurists gathered in the Justice Center on Court Street for a presentation on the history of the county's Common Pleas Court, which also turned 200 on Friday. A crowd gathered on lawn chairs under the shade of trees in Ely Square and on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of the Old Courthouse — opened in 1881 at a cost of $200,000, according to local historian Don Hilton — to watch commissioners conduct "old" business and announce new business alike. When Lorain County was founded in 1824, there were only 24 states in the Union, the daily wage was 44 cents, and members of the First Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Elyria held their first services in a log cabin, Gibbs said. Commissioners Jeff Riddell, David Moore and Michelle Hung read biographies and brief histories of their 1824 counterparts — Benjamin Bacon, Asahel Osborne and John S. Reid, respectively — while county Treasurer Dan Talarek gave an account of Edmund West, his long-ago predecessor. The board also did a brief reenactment of West's 1824 appointment to the position of county treasurer, which took place at the first-ever county commissioners meeting on May 24, 1824. Joining the three sitting commissioners on Friday were five of the eight living former commissioners: Ted Kalo, Lori Kokoski, Matt Lundy, Sharon Sweda and Mary Jo Vasi. The other three who did not attend Friday are George Koury, Michael Ross and Tom Williams. Vasi, the first woman ever elected to the Board of Commissioners, thanked "everyone" in Lorain County for allowing her to serve in the "humble" position from 1989 to 2004. Calling attention to a number of historical displays by her organization as well as the Elyria Black Legacy Connection surrounding the Old Courthouse steps, Lorain County Historical Society Executive Director Kerri Broome called the county's bicentennial "a very important time to learn about our history." Also announced Friday was that Sept. 29 is the scheduled date for the dedication of a countywide memorial to Gold Star families, to be built next to the existing Lorain County Police Memorial on Courthouse Square between Court Street and Middle Avenue in Elyria. A Gold Star family is one that has lost a family member in the military in the line of duty. Plans are to build a $285,000 memorial using public money and donations. That includes $150,000 pledged by the Board of Commissioners, said Jacob Smith, executive director of the Lorain County Veterans Services Commission, who said he was on his way Friday to pick up a check for another $5,000 toward the Gold Star memorial. "We sometimes forget to memorialize and honor those families" who lost loved ones in military service, Gold Star family member Kimberly Hazelgrove, whose husband was killed in Iraq, told the crowd. She also asked them to remember that Memorial Day "is not a happy time for many people in Lorain County" such as those who lost loved ones in war. Friday's events also featured a presentation by Tony Gallo, president and CEO of the county Chamber of Commerce, of a Kousa dogwood tree to be planted in celebration of the Bicentennial, and the filling of a time capsule to be sealed and opened on some future notable anniversary. Dennis Sadowski of the Black River Stamp Club, Elyria Postmaster Edward Trusnik and retired U.S. Postal Service employee and Bicentennial Committee member Rose Street also announced that Firelands High School students Ava Zingales, Brigid Ziese and Maggie Tansey were the winners of the bicentennial Pictorial Postmark competition. All three are students of teacher Laura Tawil, and were among the 13 Firelands students who submitted their designs for a postal cachet, which in stamp collecting is a design or inscription added as a decoration to an envelope, stationery or card. The celebration's emcee, Lorain native and WEWS NewsChannel 5 reporter and "Good Morning Cleveland" anchor Tiffany Tarpley, summed up the sentiment of the festivities as the program drew to a close around noon Friday: "Happy birthday, Lorain County!" she said, inviting those present to enjoy birthday cake. Tarpley graduated from Admiral King High School in Lorain, and attended Lorain County Community College before going on to attend and graduate from Bowling Green State University. She said she was "honored" to come back home and be with the community where she grew up, as well as to be "your tour guide to our history." Common Pleas Court Court officials, judges, attorneys and court employees also celebrated the court's 200th birthday on Friday with a brief ceremony and refreshments inside the Justice Center on Court Street in Elyria. It was hosted by Judge Melissa Kobasher, the youngest of six Common Pleas judges and only the second woman elected to the General Division bench, with remarks by Broome, Hilton and Judge Christopher Rothgery, the most-senior judge currently on the Common Pleas bench. Kobasher and Rothgery have followed in the footsteps of Lorain County's first Common Pleas judge, George Tod. As "president judge" in 1824, he oversaw associate judges Henry Brown, Moses Eldred and Frederick Hamlin, the three of whom "may or may not have had a legal education," Kobasher noted. One of the first-ever entries in the Common Pleas docket in 1824 noted that a grand jury was empaneled to hear criminal cases, "then dismissed for lack of business," Kobasher said. The first civil judgment in county history was a finding for plaintiff Simon Nichols, who was awarded $1,427.27 after he sued defendant Thomas G. Bronson and won (That's just over $46,000 in 2024 dollars). Those early days of the court were relatively quiet: In 2023, Common Pleas judges heard 3,668 civil cases, 2,415 criminal cases, 2,550 domestic relations cases, 7,876 juvenile cases and 2,082 probate cases, Kobasher said. Hilton, the author of a biographical book on the history of Lorain County Common Pleas judges as well as a second brief history published in honor of the bicentennial celebration, said he wasn't much interested in the law or the courts until he was asked to write a book about its judges through history — then was asked to serve as foreman on a grand jury. "As an outsider looking in, I suppose the biggest surprise to me is how crummy a place this is to try to keep secrets," Hilton noted to laughter from the audience. President Judge George Tod traveled hundreds of miles on horseback across a multicounty district including Lorain County hearing cases starting in 1824. He was paid the same salary as the governor at the time: $1,000 per year, according to Hilton. The county prosecutor made less, about $1,200 in modern money, was the only "real lawyer" in the county, and argued in front of the three associate judges, each of whom earned "about $90 a day," Hilton said. With just one lawyer to four judges, "Has the ratio ever been so sweet again?" he wondered out loud. In his remarks, Rothgery joked that being a lawyer is "an occupation overpopulated by storytellers," and he was no exception, telling humorous anecdotes about his run-ins with judges and other attorneys. There was the unnamed judge who, as Rothgery faced a difficult cross-examination of a police detective who had arrested his client, out of nowhere declared in front of the jury that the detective was one of the most trustworthy men you could possibly imagine. There was the Court Street Cafe, where as a young attorney Rothgery went and heard tales from attorneys who were as much as 50 years older than him, including associates of his father, Kenneth, himself a longtime Lorain County attorney. And then there was the famed Lorain County defense attorney Lon Adams — known not only for his willingness to take on big murder cases but his "aggressiveness at extracting money from prospective clients," Rothgery said. "If you think about it, somebody's been doing essentially the same function I do every day in essentially the same geographic location, and they've been doing it for 200 years," he said. Broome concluded her remarks on the history of the Common Pleas Court with a quote from an 1876 U.S. centennial speech by Judge Washington Wallace Boynton. Boynton was a Russia Township — now New Russia Township — native, three-term Lorain County prosecutor in the early 1860s who was elected to one term in the Ohio Legislature in 1865. He served on the Common Pleas bench from 1869 to 1876 then later on the Ohio Supreme Court for five years, according to Hilton's book "Dearly Departed Judges of Lorain County, Ohio, 1824-2020." According to Broome, Boynton said the following on the nation's 100th birthday: "Let us my friends rejoice in the example, in the courage, in the patriotism and work of those hearty pioneers. Let us rejoice that we are the honored recipients of the blessings they secured and transmitted. Let us rejoice in the happy and glorious future of which the present is so full of promise, and above all let us rejoice in a country whose progress during this century up the highway of nations commands alike the wonder and admiration of the world, and whose crowning glory is that before the century's close it extended the aegis of its protection and imparted the full fruition of its liberty to the humblest citizen of the land," Boynton said, according to Broome. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com.