INDIANA TRAILS
BOONE COUNTY INDIANA'S FIRST JUDGE
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Bethuel
F. Morris
Although fleetingly mentioned occasionally in old publications, Bethuel F. Morris, the first judge of the Boone Circuit Court, is today pretty much of a forgotten man in so far as Boone County history is concerned. Formation of Boone County was ordered by the Indiana General Assembly in legislation enacted on January 29, 1830, effective on April 1st of that year. Nothing was done about giving the new county a court until two years later, when, on February 3, 1832, the General Assembly passed an act placing Boone County in the Fifth Judicial Circuit. The eleven counties in the circuit included Marion, Hendricks, Morgan, Johnson, Bartholomew, Shelby. Hancock, Madison, Hamilton, Grant, and Boone. In error, the first edition published of “Birth Certificates” of Boone County, Indiana, and Lebanon, named only ten counties as comprising the Fifth Judicial Circuit, Grant County having been inadvertently omitted. When Boone County was named to be included in the Fifth Judicial Circuit, Bethuel F. Morris of Indianapolis, was president judge, having been elected to that office by the Indiana General Assembly on January 17, 1825. He was reelected in 1828, vacating the bench by resignation on November 13, 1834. At the time, Harvey Gregg, also of Indianapolis, was the prosecuting attorney for the Circuit. Assisted by Associate Judges William Kenworty of Sugar Creek Township, and Jacob Johns of Jackson Township. Morris held Boone County's first official court hearings in the log cabin home of John Calvin in Jamestown. ten the county seat, on April 19 and 20, 1332, at which time a grand jury was impaneled. The October session that year was held in the home of Cornelius Westfall, in Thorntown, which town Westfall had just founded and platted. The April. 1833, term of the Boone Circuit Court was held under the bough -covered extension of Abner H. Longley’s log cabin porch in newly founded Lebanon, with the October, 1833, term being conducted in the county's new and first courthouse, a two story log structure located on the north side of the public square where the Knights of Pythias Castle Hall building now stands. Judge Morris was born in Pennsylvania on September 6, 1792, moved to Ohio when 18 years old, served in the War of 1812, and finally came to Brookville, Indiana, where he founded the Brooksville Plain Dealer and edited it for some three years. He was also Franklin County's recorder for a short time. He married Elizabeth John and fathered two sons, Sanford and Samuel. Moving to Indiana's new state capital, Indianapolis, Morris edited the Indianapolis Gazette for a brief period, practiced law, and served the state as agent to sell certain state owned lands in Indiana's new capital. He was an Indianapolis surveyor in 1831; a trustee from 1828 to 1836 of Indiana College, now Indiana University; and a founder and first secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, organized in 1830. For a number of years after resigning the judgeship, Morris was a cashier in an Indianapolis bank. He was an elder in the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis from 1838 until his death on February 1, 1884. While judge, Morris made a declaration against the right of transit through Indiana of slave holders with slaves. It was said of him that as a lawyer he was a patient and laborious investigator of his case, and that as a judge, he was a fair, just man, incapable of partiality and prejudice. In Morris’ obituary in the Indianapolis Daily Journal of February 2, 1864, was the comment that he “...,for many years administered justice with marked ability and unsullied integrity. Judge Morris had few equals in the state as a jurist, and no judge ever left the bench with a purer reputation.” |