Xenia

The commissioners had a rule: put the county seat near the center of the county, on good land. They chose the forks of Shawnee Creek, three miles above where it meets the Little Miami. John Paul, who had learned where the seat would go, rode to Cincinnati and bought the land, then sold the 257 acres to the county's director, Joseph C. Vance, for two hundred fifty dollars. James Galloway surveyed it and laid out the lots in the fall of 1803. The first courtroom was a two-story log cabin, finished in a building race that William Beatty won, opening his tavern on October 1, 1804.

Shawnee Creek forks near where the town went up, and the water runs three miles down to the Little Miami, and from there to the Ohio. The creek keeps an Indian name. So did the ground three miles north, Old Chillicothe, the Indian word that meant simply town, used long before a surveyor ran Galloway's lines across it. The county did not find empty land here. It put a brick courthouse at a fork in a creek that already had a name, a few miles from a town that already had one too.

When it came time to name the new county seat, the founders met where Main now crosses Detroit, and people offered the usual names: Washington, Wayne, Greenville. A scholarly stranger passing through said he would offer a Greek word for the hospitality he had been shown. He proposed Xenia. The ballots tied. Laticia Davis, wife of the man who had hosted the first county court, was allowed a vote, and cast it for Xenia. The stranger thanked them for deciding in his favor and rode off. He was Rev. Robert Armstrong, who had left Kentucky over slavery, telling his presbytery that slaveholders were buying up the land around his congregation, leaving it no room to grow. Much of that congregation followed him north and built their first church of peeled hickory logs.