The story
Welcome to Albion
Albion was laid out in 1846 at the geographical center of Noble County, after the county seat had moved from Sparta to Augusta to Port Mitchell. Its Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse of 1889 still stands on the square.
Noble County’s seat of justice wandered for its first ten years. The commissioners first named Sparta, where no county buildings were ever built; Augusta, about two miles west of the present Albion, got a frame courthouse, which burned in 1843; and in 1844 the seat moved to Port Mitchell. A county election in June 1846 chose instead the empty land at the county’s center, then called ‘Center.’ The land there had been entered in 1836, and it was said that the proprietors gave every third lot to the county in return for the county seat.
Albion was laid out in November 1846 by Samuel Hanna, William F. Engle, John L. White, Warren Chaffee and James L. Worden, the county agent. About February 1847 Mrs. Washburn and Isaac Swarthout built the first two dwellings, and that summer there was a rush of newcomers. Samuel T. Clymer of Goshen finished a frame courthouse in 1847 for $4,045, and on September 16 the county records were moved in. Clymer also brought the first stock of goods. By the start of 1848 at least seventy people lived in Albion, and about 250 by 1850.
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The frame courthouse burned in January 1859, very likely, the 1882 history says, by incendiaries, and George Harvey built a brick one in 1861 for $11,000. A stone jail with rooms for the sheriff’s family followed in the mid-1870s. In 1874 the railroad reached Albion, and on June 8 of that year, after the voters had approved it 85 to 44, the commissioners created the Incorporated Town of Albion.
The second courthouse was condemned in 1887, and the present building, designed by Edward O. Fallis of Toledo in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, was dedicated on October 15, 1889. William M. Clapp founded Albion’s first bank in 1875, and a Carnegie library was finished on the square west of the courthouse in 1918. The 2020 census counted 2,222 people in Albion.
