Beavercreek

When Greene County was organized in 1803, it had no courthouse, so it borrowed a house. Court met in the log home of Owen Davis, a miller on Beaver creek, five and a half miles west of where Xenia would later stand. The same building, sometimes called the Peter Borders house, served as the county's first courthouse until the June term of 1804, when Xenia was ready. Beavercreek was one of the four original townships laid out that year, second in size only to Mad River, with a hundred and fifty-four voters. The county started here, in a borrowed room.

The creek came first, and the township took its name. Beaver creek runs down the west of the county and empties into the Little Miami, and the first settlers built along it. Owen Davis put his mill on the water. General Whiteman settled near its mouth in 1799, on the bottomland by what is now the Harbine farm, and lived there about five years before he moved upriver to Clifton. The first courthouse stood near the same farm, and a few of the township's earliest settlers lie buried close by in graves no one marked. The water that named the place was the reason there was a place at all.

Benjamin Whiteman came to Kentucky as a boy in 1782 and grew up a soldier, marching with Boone, then under Harmar and Wayne against the Shawnee towns. In 1793 he married Owen Davis's daughter. In 1799 he brought his family north and settled at the mouth of Beaver creek, in the county that had not been made yet. When it was made, in 1803, Whiteman was named one of its first associate judges. So he sat in judgment in his father-in-law's log house, holding the county's first courts in a borrowed home until the seat moved to Xenia. He had helped take this ground. Then he helped govern it.