Brown County (Ohio)

Brown County is a county in the U.S. state of Ohio. As of the 2010 census, the population was 44,846. The county seat is Georgetown. The county was created in 1818 and is named for Major General Jacob Brown, an officer in the War of 1812 who was wounded at the Battle of Lundy's Lane.Brown County is part of the Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN Metropolitan Statistical Area.HistoryAmong the early settlers to Brown County was Jesse Root Grant, father of Ulysses S. Grant, who built a home and set up a tannery in Georgetown where Ulysses grew up.Brown County was said to be the place of origin of the White Burley type of tobacco, grown in 1864 by George Webb and Joseph Fore on the farm of Captain Frederick Kautz near Higginsport from seed from Bracken County, Kentucky. He noticed it yielded a different type of light leaf shaded from white to yellow, and cured differently. By 1866, he harvested 20,000 pounds of Burley tobacco and sold it in 1867 at the St. Louis Fair for $58 per hundred pounds. By 1883, the principal market for this tobacco was Cincinnati, but it was grown throughout central Kentucky and Middle Tennessee. Later the type became referred to as burley tobacco, and it was air-cured.