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County Seat of
Washington County
By Frank McNeely
[Source]
In 1855 an act was passed by the territorial
legislature reorganizing Washington county and designating
Fort Calhoun as the county-seat.
De Soto, a small village five miles north of Fort
Calhoun, wished the county-seat to be moved there. In the
winter of 1858 a crowd of De Soto citizens organized and with
arms went to Fort Calhoun to take the county-seat by force.
Fort Calhoun citizens barricaded themselves in the log
courthouse and held off the De Soto band until the afternoon
of the second day, when by compromise, the county-seat was
turned over to De Soto. One man was killed in this contest, in
which I was a participant.
The county-seat remained in De Soto until an election
in the fall of 1866 when the vote of the people relocated it
at Fort Calhoun, where it remained until 1869. An election in
the latter year made Blair the county seat.
A courthouse was built in Blair, the present
county-seat of Washington county, in 1889, at a cost of
$50,000.
NOTE - In the early days every new town, and they
were all new, was ambitious to become the county seat and
many of them hopefully sought the honor of becoming the
capital of the territory. Washington county had its full
share of aspiring towns and most of them really got beyond
the paper stage. There were De Soto, Fort Calhoun, Rockport,
Cuming City, and last but not least - Fontenelle, then in
Washington county, now a "deserted village" in Dodge county.
Of these only Fort Calhoun remains more than a memory. De
Soto, was founded by Potter C. Sullivan and others in 1854,
and in 1857 had about five hundred population. It began to
go down in 1859, and when the city of Blair was started its
decline was rapid. Rockport, which was in the vicinity of
the fur trading establishments of early days, was a
steamboat landing of some importance and had at one time a
population of half a hundred or more. Now only the beautiful
landscape remains. Cuming City, like De Soto, received its
death blow when Blair was founded, and now the townsite is
given over to agricultural purposes.
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