Judge Benjamin F. Metcalf was born in Wayne County in 1817, the second-youngest of 10 children. Metcalf, according to some accounts, studied law while working as a tailor and eventually became a common pleas court judge. He also founded a short-lived newspaper, the Section 10 Budget, in what became Delphos. He died in late February 1865.
Courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
When Common Pleas Judge Benjamin F. Metcalf, a Democrat who sat on the bench during the divisive days of the Civil War, died at his West Market Street home in the last days of the war, the Democratic newspapers were quick with praise.
The Wapakoneta Democrat wrote that “with all of Judge M.’s faults, he was a great, good and very useful man.” The Marion Mirror noted that “Judge Metcalf was a gentleman of fine mind and noble heart; a just judge and a firm friend” while the Dayton Empire described him as “a man of more than ordinary natural endowments, of a social and generous disposition.”
The Allen County Democrat, on March 8, 1865, wrote, “He was firmly and conscientiously attached to the doctrines of the Democratic party, though he was not extreme in his views. And from the commencement of the war, he was enthusiastically for the preservation of the whole American Union, though he could never see that the best way to preserve that Union was by the disregard of all safeguards of liberty, which alone makes free institutions the desire and hope of the human race.”
Meanwhile, the rival Lima Weekly Gazette, which regularly pilloried the judge and the previous July had accused him of firing a musket from horseback in the Public Square, said next to nothing. “By the death of Judge Metcalf a vacancy is created on the Common Pleas bench,” the newspaper wrote March 1, 1865. “The Governor has the appointing power until the next general election. We learn that there are two or three applicants for the position.”
Metcalf, who was not yet 48 years old when he died of “dropsy” (heart problems) on Feb. 28, 1865, had lived an eventful life.
Born in 1817 in Wayne County, he was the next-to-youngest of 10 children, according to the 1905 history of Allen County, which provided a Lincolnesque description of his education. “He learned, while a mere boy, the trade of tailor and studied law while working at his trade. With book propped up before him he stitched and studied at the same time. In his case we have a beautiful example of the survival of the fittest, as the strongest side came up, and a tailor was spoiled to make what was to be our greatest judge.”
Metcalf studied law in Troy before moving to Sidney, where he was nominated for prosecuting attorney but lost, the Allen County Democrat wrote, adding that “he was invited in 1844 to settle in Putnam County, and make the Democratic Northwest his home, which he accordingly did.” From his home in Kalida, then the county seat, he was elected to the Ohio Legislature, where, according to the newspaper, “he was not a frequent speaker but held rank as a young man of more than ordinary promise and ability.”
Around 1848, he moved to the area that would become Delphos, founding the short-lived Section 10 Budget newspaper. In 1851, Section 10 merged with the neighboring towns of Howard, Bredeick and East Bredeick to form Delphos. By then, the Budget had folded, and Metcalf had been elected to the common pleas bench. Soon after he moved to Lima.
In Lima, Metcalf built a home on a wooded lot near what today is the southeast corner of Market and Metcalf streets. The home at 553 W. Market St., described as one of the “gingerbread homes” that “stirred the civic pride,” was razed in 1950 to make room for a drug store.
In 1854, Metcalf was defeated in his bid for re-election.
“After his defeat, Judge M. returned assiduously to the practice of the duties of his profession but was too short a time in practice to determine what would have been his ultimate success,” the Democrat wrote. “Originally of a spare and lean figure, at 30 years of age weighing only about 130 pounds – on the bench he grew of very full habit, his weight ordinarily reaching nearly 200 pounds, but with his corpulence he retained fully his mental power.”
In 1859, with the area falling under the court’s jurisdiction modified, Metcalf was returned to the bench.
“The judge’s charge was able, and somewhat severe on criminal offenses,” the Allen County Democrat wrote in February 1859. “He urged the necessity of firmly giving effect to the laws.”
The Gazette took the opportunity to poke fun at a political rival.
“Judge Metcalf took his seat upon the bench on Tuesday morning last, dressed in a new suit of clothes, from head to foot,” the newspaper wrote May 5, 1859. “There is something really suspicious about this. Where did the Judge get the good clothes?”
By July 1864, with a presidential election looming between Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat George McClellan and partisan politics dominating the newspapers, Metcalf became a favorite target of the Gazette.
“Judge Metcalf recently announced in a democratic convention that his resolution was superior to any that the Almighty had yet produce,” the Gazette wrote, “and if God Almighty had any better ones, that he wanted Him to send them down just then. Such a remark from such a source surprised no one, because all who know the Judge fully understand his own opinion of himself.”
Less than a year later, Metcalf was dead, and the Allen County Democrat gave a sharply different view of him.
“It is just to say that as a man, a Judge, a citizen and a Patriot, he was an honor to his native State, and to the section of country in which he lived,” according to the Allen County Democrat. “His has been a useful life, and he died in the performance of his duties.”
Metcalf was survived by his wife, Mary Ditter Metcalf, whom he had married in 1845. She died in Ottawa in October 1884 at the home of one of the couple’s daughters.
“After her husband’s death, she spent most her time with her children, Mrs. Gen. A.V. Rice, of Ottawa; Mrs. R. Langan, of Washington, D.C.; Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, of Reno, Nevada; and Benj. Metcalf, of Nevada,” the Lima Daily Democratic Times wrote Nov. 3, 1884.
Daughter Mary was born in 1846 and married Gen. Americus V. Rice, a native of Richland County, in 1866. Rice, who had enlisted in the Union Army in April 1861, rose quickly through the ranks and distinguished himself at battles in Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia, where he was wounded in fighting at Resaca.
Following the war, he ran the Rice & Company bank in Ottawa and served in the U.S. Congress from 1874 to 1878. He also served as U.S. pension commissioner at Columbus and as purchasing agent for the census department in Washington, D.C. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Mary “Coot” Rice died in January 1923.
Elizabeth Metcalf, born in 1853, married Defiance native John Newton Evans in 1877, and the couple settled in the West, first in California and then Nevada.
“They moved to Reno in 1879,” the Reno Gazette Journal wrote when she died in July 1924, “to the home on Evans Avenue, the ranch home built forty-give years ago when the ranch included all the land now occupied by the University of Nevada (which the couple donated). Mrs. Evans watched the planting of every tree, never dreaming that she would live to see them shade the house.”
Her husband, a leading Reno citizen who had first come to the West in 1859, was killed in a fall from a pile of baled hay in November 1903.
Benjamin F. Metcalf, who was born in 1861, never married. He died in St. Paul, Minnesota, in April 1922. Roena Metcalf was born in 1851 and married William C. Langan in 1873.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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