{ Enacted by the Ohio Legislature in 1905, the Brannock Bill provided local communities with limited authority to control the sale of alcoholic beverages within their jurisdictions.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was growing support for Prohibition in Ohio. Groups such as the Ohio Anti-Saloon League and the American Anti-Saloon League were successful in gaining the attention of some lawmakers in the state legislature. The result was the Brannock Bill, which supported local option. Local option was a way for communities to decide for themselves if they wanted to allow the sale of alcohol. This was a very controversial issue in Ohio at this time. The Ohio legislature passed the bill in 1905, but Governor Myron P. Herrick demanded several changes before signing it into law that same year. Most notably, the amended version stated that cities could only restrict alcohol sales in residential neighborhoods, Although Herrick signed the bill, his resistance was one of the reasons Ohio voters turned him out of office in the gubernatorial election of 1905. Eventually, the legislature enacted unlimited local control for communities with the passage of the Rose Law in 1908.
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