Before Easton Was Easton A Rare Old Document Comes to Light
by James Dawson Easton was not always called Easton, nor did it always have the county courthouse. As a reminder of this, I had an interesting call recently from a Distinguished Local Gentleman of Parts who found some old papers that had belonged to his father and wondered if I would look at them for him, as he was having trouble with the old handwriting, so we made an appointment for him to meet me at the bookshop. He did not know how his father had gotten these old papers. A s we put t he document s on the counter, they seemed to be old deeds and bills of sale from the mid-1800s. Interesting, maybe, but not especially exciting, until one stray detached fragment caught my eye. The D.L.G of P asked me how old I thought it was. Judging from the handwriting, I told him that it probably dated from the early 1700s, but suddenly doubting my estimate, I looked more closely at the crabbed old writing and, much to my relief, found it was dated 1710! Suddenly, this old fragment got ver y interesting. Unfor tunately, it was only a fragment, so I sifted through the dozen or so other papers
hoping to find more and, amazingly, there was the rest of it! Glancing at the full document, I saw it read, “THE COURT proceed to the Laying out Two acres of Land in Armstrong’s old field near Pitte’s Bridge, whereon to build a Court House in this County according to act of assembly etc.” This was great! It was the order to buy 2 acres of land to build the Talbot County Courthouse in what would be Easton! But first a brief history of courthouses in Talbot County. Talbot County was established in either 1661 or 1662, depending on who is counting, but never had a real courthouse until one was located in the long-vanished town of York, up near Skipton on the Wye River, in 1674 in a tavern run by Mistress Winkles that was replaced by a proper courthouse building in 1680. Prior to York, court had been held in houses of various county commissioners. Since county courthouses were usually centrally located in a county, it would seem that courthouses located up near the northern boundary of Talbot County would be inconvenient at best, but in those days Talbot County was much bigger than it is now. In fact,
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