Читать книгу Enchanted Ground - Sharon Hatfield - Страница 13
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Putting Down Roots
JONATHAN KOONS had been in Athens County for a little more than a year, plying his carpentry trade, when he met 24-year-old Abigail Tuck Bishop in the summer of 1836. Though most of his brothers and sisters had chosen spouses from Bedford, Pennsylvania, he fell for a woman from Coos County, New Hampshire, way up on the Canadian border. His musical or woodworking skills, or perhaps a visit to church, may have gained him entrée to the Bishop family, but in any case Koons soon felt he had found a kindred spirit in Abigail. “The young lady was a member of the Episcopal Methodist church,—but liberal in her views, having been favored with facilities [faculties] leading to higher views than those entertained by many of her order,” Koons recounted in his autobiography. “Her profession was that of a school teacher, which during her avocation, brought her in contact with many free thinkers, who inspired her with a desire to be also mentally free.” Abigail’s free thinking may have led to her membership in the Methodist church, a somewhat unusual arrangement, given that her own father, Samuel Gaylord Bishop, was a Calvinistic Baptist minister.
In considering Jonathan as a prospective bridegroom, Abigail must have realized that here was a man who had mostly given up on organized religion. Back in Pennsylvania during his apprentice days, he had decided to undergo formal instruction in the Presbyterian church, partly as a way to honor his father. But Koons quickly found church doctrine unappealing—a worldview that “threatened the wandering and disconsolate pilgrim with eternal woe and despair, every step he advanced.” Once his studies were finished, he quietly left the church into which he had been baptized as a baby and never looked back. “[I] set my course for a more fair and happy land, under the compass and sail of individual sovereignty and self preservation,” he would later write.
Though Abigail may have been more conventionally religious and better educated than Jonathan, they shared the world of ideas. As a farm boy rich in oral tradition but bereft of formal schooling, Koons had struggled to become a learned man. In his autobiography he reveals that except for “a few quarters” in school when he was young, he was largely self-taught. At the time he began his apprenticeship, around 1830, he was “without a literary education—except that of an indifferent reader.” In his early twenties Koons sought to remedy that lack of refinement by fashioning his own library, which included “a carpenter’s architecture, practical geometry, common arithmetic, mensuration of solids, Comstock’s natural philosophy, Guys’ pocket encyclopedia, Gall and Spurzheim’s phrenology, Walker’s dictionary[,] Buck’s theological Dictionary, Josephus’ History of the Jews, and a few others of less importance.” These texts supplemented what was probably the first book he had ever owned—“an old Bible,” which he obtained “in exchange for little articles of traffic, when a little sportive lad at home.” Though lacking in academic credentials, Koons had prepared himself to converse with the schoolmistress on the topics of the day.
If the minister’s daughter were to accept Koons’s suit that summer of 1836, she would not be getting a pious husband but, as an admirer later wrote, an intelligent one whose restless mind “was full of ideas that ring like true metal.” By that fall it was a bargain she was ready to make.
* * *
ON October 27, 1836, Jonathan and Abigail’s summer romance turned into a lifetime commitment when the two were married in Athens County by a justice of the peace. It remains a mystery why her father did not preside over the ceremony and what the Bishops thought about the fiddle-playing Pennsylvania Dutchman who had captured their daughter’s heart.
What is clear is that Koons had married into a family of some means. In 1814—when Abigail was about three years old—her father had bought land in Athens County, presumably sight unseen. For the sum of $3,200 Bishop acquired 1,600 acres in northern Ames Township. Though he perhaps did not realize it, he may have been sitting on a fortune. His $2-an-acre domain lay in the Sunday Creek watershed, which would eventually become known for the vast coal deposits that had lain under the dense tree cover for millions of years. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, it was simply a remote area where the burr oaks grew thick, showering the forest floor with their showy fringed acorns.
In addition to being landowners, the Bishops prided themselves on being part of the learned class. Samuel Bishop was born in 1769 in Connecticut and married Abigail Tuck, the daughter of a Harvard-educated minister, in 1800. At their wedding at the Pittsfield Meeting House in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, the presiding cleric gave a sermon on “the importance of right views in matrimony.” The theme held good auguries for the couple, who were to become lifelong partners. Less than a month before, Bishop had taken the podium to eulogize the recently deceased George Washington. The minister soon had his speech published so “that the reader may know what a good and virtuous example is, and be excited to copy it.”
In 1833, when Bishop had owned the Athens County acreage for nearly twenty years, he brought his family to Ohio. Why he decided to relocate to the wilderness at age 64 is not known, but apparently only his wife, Abigail, and three of their seven children—Almira, James, and Abigail—made the move. Soon after their arrival, Samuel laid out 20 town lots for a settlement he called Bishopville and eventually built a home there.
The next year Bishop divided his Athens County property among his heirs, reserving a small swath along Sunday Creek for himself and his wife. Their daughters, Abigail Tuck Bishop and her older sister, Almira Bishop Fuller, received a portion of their father’s considerable holdings in what was now known as Homer Township, as did three of his sons and Almira’s husband. In all the deeds Samuel Bishop mentioned his love and affection for his children. The amount of land allotted to each heir varied, but what is striking about these arrangements is that the women reaped more than a token inheritance. In a time when sons often acquired all the land and daughters were lucky to get a cow or feather bed, Abigail and Almira received a hefty slice of their father’s estate.
On the land that Bishop gave to the then-unmarried 22-year-old Abigail, the elderly minister hoped to carry out an ambitious plan. He had decided to start a secondary school in Bishopville amid the acreage he was deeding to her. From Abigail’s holdings he reserved “a plat of house lots containing in their midst a common of about three acres on which it is calculated to erect a school house for the instruction of youth by the name of Bishop’s Fraternal Calvanistic [Calvinistic] Baptist Seminary.” He also set aside three lots to construct housing and work space for the instructors and students.
Bishop soon deeded a 100-acre tract adjoining the school grounds to five local Calvinistic Baptist men who agreed to serve as trustees. He was donating the land, he said, because of “the love and goodwill that I bear to the present rising and future generations and the earnest desire that I have to be instrumental of promoting learning morality and piety in them all.” Bishop envisioned an academy whose male and female students could work to pay all or part of their tuition and living expenses. He promised to compensate students “at a reasonable price” for cultivating the donated land around the school. He had a soft spot for impoverished scholars, who could “pay in whole by their labor if they should wish[,] for it is given for that express purpose and for no other.” Bishop also authorized the trustees to “erect shops” on the school grounds and to “furnish materials for mechanics, for the same purpose: also, furnish places and stock for female labor, sewing, braiding, and all such other kinds of labor as may be deemed expedient.”
Bishop did not explain why he had decided to locate the seminary within Abigail’s land. Could he have expected that she, as the unmarried schoolteacher daughter, would play a role in the new school? Or was it simply the best location on which to build? Whatever her father’s intention, Abigail soon leased the 40-acre plot surrounding the proposed school grounds back to her parents for their lifetime use, “in consideration of the love good will and affection” she had for her “honored Father and Mother.” The rent was to consist of “one ear of corn to be paid to me my heirs or assigns from year to year on the first day of January” and only “when demanded.” After her marriage Abigail would sell this land back to her parents, retaining a separate tract of over 100 acres as her inheritance.
* * *
SHORTLY after Koons’s move to Ohio, his mother, Margaret, fell gravely ill back in Pennsylvania. Though he was far away, Koons felt a close tie to her, writing that she was “as honest, amiable, kind and affectionate a mother as ever graced the earth.” As she lay dying, Margaret told the family she could not go peacefully without one final visit with Jonathan, to whom, in his words, she had always extended “one of the most tender threads of her affection.” There was not enough time to send a letter bidding her son to come home, so it appeared her final wish could not be granted. As friends and relatives gathered around the unconscious woman to witness her final breath, Jonathan Koons was having a synchronistic vision. As he later wrote: “Her spirit left its senseless tenement a sufficient length of time to pay me a visit in Ohio, three hundred miles distant, and then returned back, and reanimated her frail remains, that had been partially adjusted with the funeral habiliments, and delivered the unexpected tidings of her visit, in the relation of which she announced that she had now seen me, and was prepared to depart in peace. She even related what I was engaged at, and the condition of my person, which proved to be strictly true.”
Jonathan’s brother Lewis wrote to him soon after their mother’s death. He was curious to confirm Margaret’s account—seemingly gained by clairvoyance. Jonathan swore to Lewis that his mother’s information was correct in all respects.
* * *
UPON their marriage in October 1836, Jonathan and Abigail, both 25, set up housekeeping in Amestown, a farming settlement some 10 miles distant from the patch of virgin forest in Dover Township that they would eventually call home. Koons continued to work as a carpenter for paying customers while slowly carving out a working farm on their own land, which by now had swelled to 522 acres, the result of a second real estate purchase he had made that summer.
Except for floods along Federal Creek, Amestown and the surrounding Ames Township had much to recommend to the young couple. Pioneers arriving there in 1798 in dugout canoes had brought with them progressive values that included an emphasis on education. One of the earliest schools had Harvard graduates on the faculty and students reciting the words of Cassius and Brutus at a school assembly. According to the 1833 Ohio Gazette, the township “contains two stores, a number of mills, a handsome brick Presbyterian meeting house, two brick school houses, [and] an incorporated circulating library.” Before the end of the decade the village of Amesville would be officially established, but even that designation did not relieve women of the necessity of crossing the main street on horseback when the thoroughfare was muddy, thus keeping their skirts and pantalets dry.
The idea of a circulating library might have been especially appealing to Abigail, the former schoolteacher, and to her husband, given his love of books. As early as 1803 or 1804, settlers in Ames Township (the western part of which would become Dover) had created the Western Library Association to have a circulating book collection in their community. Residents bought shares or memberships in the WLA in exchange for the opportunity to borrow books. The money was used to purchase the library’s volumes. Cash was hard to come by on the frontier, so some of the founding members had paid with raccoon or bear pelts instead, earning the enterprise the colorful moniker Coonskin Library.
Along with a desire for literacy, a strain of antislavery sentiment ran through Amestown, one probably shared by Abigail, whose father was noted to be a “strong Abolitionist.” One Ames resident recalled that when he was a small boy, his father instructed him to take food to a certain rock deep in the woods and leave quickly. When the coast was deemed clear, escaped slaves would emerge from their hiding place in a cave to claim the provisions. The boy’s father would eventually escort them to the next station on the Underground Railroad.
The extent of Jonathan and Abigail’s involvement in the activities of the Amestown community is not clear, but while living there in October 1837, they welcomed their first child, a little boy they called Nahum Ward Koons. The baby was given the name of Nahum Ward of Marietta, the man from whom Koons had bought his second tract of land. Ward was a philanthropist as well as Marietta’s former mayor and a successful land speculator; his name is scattered through the deed books of several counties. Not only did Jonathan and Abigail’s baby bear the name of one of the area’s luminaries, he had a Bible name: Nahum was a visionary prophet of the Old Testament. Perhaps this combination of worldly success and heavenly guidance resonated with the young couple.
In June 1838 they moved to their Dover Township property with little Nahum. Over time the family would clear about 60 acres, plant 500 fruit trees, and build a sturdy log house, barn, and other outbuildings. But for now this high ridgetop on the lower end of Sunday Creek—crowned with a knoll that would later be called Mount Nebo—was still a place given over to wildness; only one neighbor could be found within 2 miles. In these solitary environs survival would depend on their resourcefulness—and, upon occasion, a touch of divine intervention.
* * *
ONE cold morning that December, a young man named E. Johnson ran to Koons’s house calling for help. Johnson and his coworker, M. Linscott, both of whom were boarding with the Koons family, had been out making rails. Linscott had struck himself in the foot with an ax and lay badly injured. Could Koons bring a horse and some bandages? While gathering up the supplies, Koons remembered a form of old folk magic practiced by his father back in Bedford. “Having a theoretic knowledge of the modus operandi in the ‘witch’ system of treatment, I thought this was a good opportunity for experimenting,” Koons wrote. “I accordingly applied the remedy, as previously directed, simply by invoking the impelling agents that actuated Christ, for their special care and protection in behalf of the afflicted.”
Johnson led Koons into the woods, where he found the helpless Linscott lying on a steep bluff, his blood staining the frosty ground. The young boarder was so weak that he could not stand. Strangely, though, his wound had stopped bleeding. They took him to the Koons house and placed him on a mattress on the floor. When his shoe and stocking were removed, Koons was horrified to see that Linscott had chopped his foot nearly in half. Nonetheless the foot was bandaged without stitching together the severed blood vessels, and in the process only a single spurt of blood hit the wall of the cabin. Linscott spent just a week recovering, with no further blood loss or complications, and experienced a pain-free convalescence at the Koons home. “I do not claim, however, that I was instrumental in producing these happy effects,” Jonathan Koons wrote. “I simply give the facts.”
When Koons reflexively used the chants of white magic to staunch the flow of blood from Linscott’s foot, he was following a tradition long established among the Pennsylvania Dutch. Jonathan’s father, Peter, as well as a cousin on the Koons side, had been called powwow doctors back in Bedford. This term had nothing to do with Native Americans but was a system of European folk magic dating back hundreds of years. The overwhelming majority of its practitioners considered themselves Christians, believing that divine aid could flow through them to help stop bleeding, heal burns, or cure other ailments.
Of his father Jonathan Koons wrote: “He was possessed of powerful magnetic forces, and many wonderful cures were performed through and by him, with what was called the laying on of hands.” Jonathan recalled a time when Peter cured his son Solomon of a raging fever when the boy had been given up for dead. Peter would also blow his breath on severe burns to prevent them from blistering. His care extended to animals, such as horses with colic and other illnesses. “He believed that his healing powers were transmitted, or conferred by certain spirits, whom he universally invoked on his healing occasions,” Jonathan Koons explained. “The spirits he generally invoked on these occasions, were ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ ‘John the Baptist,’ and some of the apostles of Christ.” Several other men and women in Jonathan Koons’s childhood also had been considered healers, though the source of their power led to much speculation. “For fear of evil, many were afraid to enter their company,” he later wrote.
Jonathan Koons had carried over from Pennsylvania a respect for his father’s traditions. Although he had rejected Peter’s stout Presbyterianism, Jonathan was still attracted to his father’s mystical side; here in the Ohio Country he would find his own way to tap into the lode heretofore mined by their ancestors. In so doing he would become, for a season, one of the most highly admired mediums in antebellum America.
* * *
BACK in Bedford, most of Jonathan’s siblings soon joined an exodus to Athens County, leaving Lewis behind with their elderly father. By 1840 the area around Mount Nebo was fast becoming an enclave of the Pennsylvania Koonses and related families. Jonathan and Abigail had been living on their farm for two years and had welcomed baby Filenia, born in 1839, as a little sister to 3-year-old Nahum. Jonathan’s sister Elizabeth lived on the next farm over with her husband, Joseph Hughes, and their children. Their sister Mary, who went by her nickname, Polly, had married Nicholas Border back in Bedford, and they, too, settled nearby. In 1838 Jonathan and Abigail had sold 200 acres of their farm to the youngest Koons brother, George, for $200. With a homestead to offer, George wed Chloe Weimer, whose dowry consisted of a trunk, looking glass, and sidesaddle. The oldest Koons brother, Michael, had come west with his wife, Sarah Border. Another sister, Rachel, had migrated with her Bedford husband, Aaron Evans. Brother Solomon, too, had bought a farm a few miles away. All told, the Koons brothers and sisters had several hundred acres at their command as the 1840s began.
With more families settling around Mount Nebo, the demand for public education grew. Schooling had to be worked around more immediate matters, such as planting and harvesting crops, hunting, and chopping wood for winter, yet the Dover Township area was known as a place whose residents were often literate and valued an education for their children. In 1847 the family of Elizabeth and Joseph Hughes leased land rent-free to Dover School District No. 2 for the construction of a school. As school district directors, Jonathan, his brother George, and their neighbor Joseph Tippie did “agree to build or cause to be built a comfortable school house in a reasonable time.” Census records show that Jonathan and Abigail’s children were attending school in 1850, likely in the new building.
* * *
ABIGAIL Bishop Koons, surrounded by in-laws, had no dearth of relatives around Mount Nebo, but she must have relied mostly on letters to stay in touch with her own blood kin. If she traveled 15 miles north to the Bishop enclave in Homer Township during this period, perhaps she did so to console her elderly father on his legal entanglements. Toward the end of the 1840s Samuel Gaylord Bishop’s dream of operating a high school lay in tatters. By then legal wrangling about the proposed Bishop’s Fraternal Calvanistic [Calvinistic] Baptist Seminary had been ongoing for about 10 years. At some point a handsome two-story building of locally crafted bricks had been erected, but no classes were ever held there.
Prospects for the school had seemed bright at first. After it was incorporated by the state legislature in 1835, Bishop went on a lengthy out-of-state fundraising trip, returning in September 1836 with donated money and other valuables. But he and the trustees had a falling out, and Bishop apparently decided to go it alone. His erstwhile collaborators demanded an account of the donations he had collected for the seminary, but he refused. With the bonds of Christian fellowship now torn asunder, the trustees sued the elderly minister for damages in 1839. Years of litigation dogged Samuel after that, as first the Athens County Common Pleas Court and later the Ohio Supreme Court ruled against him. (By 1845 Homer Township had been portioned off from Athens County and made a part of Morgan County, but the case remained in Athens County.) The high court ruled that “there was in the hands of the said Samuel G. Bishop after deducting a competent amount to him for his services in collecting the same, for the use of the complainants the sum of $1,369.60.” As no payment to the victors was forthcoming, an 80-acre chunk of Bishop’s property was sold at public auction in 1849. But the litigation was destined to drag on, a nettle in what might otherwise have been a comfortable old age for 80-year-old Samuel and his wife, Abigail, five years his junior.
* * *
JONATHAN Koons’s ancestors had been blessed with the gift of longevity, with one forebear surpassing the century mark and several others living well into their eighties and nineties. Back in Pennsylvania, his father Peter died in 1847 at the age of 87 or 88. Peter’s second wife agreed to allow his son Lewis to administer the estate. Lewis had his father’s 385 acres in Monroe Township auctioned off to pay his creditors, putting the estate in the black. Lewis wrote to Jonathan that the exact amount of Peter’s legacy, $263.39, would be divided equally among the 10 heirs. Whether Peter ever saw any of his grown children after they crossed into Ohio is not known. However, a few years later Jonathan would come to believe that his father had sent him an affectionate poem—mysteriously rendered in Jonathan’s journal by the spirits—as a token of Peter’s survival in the afterlife.
* * *
AS Ohio had continued to fill up with settlers, time had shown that the land in southwestern Ohio was superior for farming; the hilly acres of the Ohio Company purchase in the southeast, prone to erosion and packed with clay, had proven a poor match for the loamy plains of the state’s breadbasket farther west. Nonetheless in 1849 the Ohio Cultivator, an agricultural journal, was predicting a prosperous future for Athens County farmers. “The time will come when the hills of old Athens will not be numbered among the least of those tributaries to your laudable agricultural exertions in Ohio,” it said. “The vast mineral resources of the county, consisting of Salt, Coal, Iron and Lime, (not yet wrought) will bring and are bringing in a large number of miners and manufacturers. The population has to be fed, insuring to the farmer here a home market, and good prices for all the products of a farm.”
Such prognostications must have been welcome news to Jonathan and Abigail, who by 1850 had a family of seven children to support. Their two daughters were 11-year-old Filenia and 8-year-old Quintilla. Nahum, 12, was the oldest son, followed by Samuel, 9; Sanders, 6; Daniel, 5; and John A., 4. In just a few years, some newspapers would call Jonathan Koons a “well-to-do” farmer, while others would describe him as poor. In truth he seemed to be a typical farmer in Dover Township with real estate valued at $2,000. In addition to the farm, Koons had $90 worth of “farming implements and machinery” and livestock valued at $200. But Abigail stood out among the women of her neighborhood in that she owned land valued at $1,000—the Sunday Creek acreage near Bishopville that her father had given her.
By now Jonathan and Abigail had sold off more of their sprawling farm, paring it down to a more manageable 160 acres—100 acres they had improved and 60 that were unimproved. Like farmers’ lives everywhere, the Koonses’ revolved around the cycles of planting and reaping, as well as the birthing and slaughtering of animals. From their ridgetop fields they produced 130 bushels of wheat, 100 bushels of Indian corn, and 10 bushels of Irish potatoes while harvesting 6 tons of hay for the livestock. Some of the children were old enough to help tend to the two horses, four “milch cows,” 30 sheep, and 9 pigs that the family owned. From the sheep they collected 100 pounds of wool; from the cows’ milk they made prodigious quantities of butter and cheese. They also kept honey bees. It was a lifestyle that made trips to town largely unnecessary.
Koons and other ridgetop farmers in the area found the higher ground well suited to growing fruit trees, with the higher altitude maintaining higher temperatures during cold spells. He was especially proud of the orchards that he called the Koons Fruit Farm. In addition to selling fruit and other produce as a cash crop, the Koonses sought more ways to bring in money. In 1850 they created $31 worth of unspecified “homemade manufactures,” and Koons performed marriages and other services as a justice of the peace. It is also possible that his wife’s property in Morgan County was producing income in some way, perhaps supplying timber for a nearby sawmill.
Jonathan and Abigail were comfortably settled on Mount Nebo among the Koons clan, but their lives were soon to be upended. They would become entangled in religious quarrels that would sweep their community—and even divide their own extended family.
* * *
AT dusk on April 20, 1850, Jonathan Koons walked steadily up the path, scarcely noticing the white object bobbing 10 to 15 paces ahead of him. His thoughts were heavy as he considered his youngest brother, George, to whom he had ministered day and night on his sickbed. After several days of such duty—perhaps spelling George’s wife, Chloe, as she tended to the couple’s four little boys—Jonathan needed to return home to see about his own family. With his dwelling just a half-mile away, he cut through a strip of woodland and reached the top of Sand Ridge, where several roads intersected at a clearing. Coming out of his reverie, he noticed that the object—more of a form, really—was still in front of him. Now he really began to pay attention. He walked faster, making a beeline for a clump of bushes that the form had darted behind. When Koons finally reached the spot, the shadowy image was gone.
He shrugged off the incident as an optical illusion and hurried home, eager to see if the farm was being kept up in his absence. Once he had satisfied himself that all was well outside, he went in and joined his children by the fire. They were anxious to know how their uncle George was doing. As Jonathan began to describe his brother’s condition, a deafening crash ripped through the upper story of the log house right over their heads.
“George is dead,” Jonathan blurted out, surprising even himself. The youngsters wanted to know how he knew.
“Did you not hear the token?” their father exclaimed.
Koons instantly wished he could recall the words. He would later write: “Of this I immediately repented, for two causes. First: I feared it would cause the children to be timid in case they believed in tokens and omens. Second: It was not in accordance with my general faith. Had I been asked ten minutes previous to the occurrence, if I believed in omens, I would have candidly told them I did not.”
As the children continued to bombard their father with questions, he recovered and began to assure them that a board must have fallen on the second story. They all trooped up the stairs to inspect, but nothing out of the ordinary revealed itself. “Not feeling prepared to reply to further inquiries on the present subject, I, instead thereof, entered a list of orders to the children, relating to their ordinary duties, and retraced my steps to my brother’s residence,” Jonathan recalled. “About two-thirds of the distance, I met a messenger on his way to inform me of my brother’s decease. I immediately inquired for the precise time of his departure, which corresponded very nearly, if not quite, to the minute the crash at my house was produced.”
George was dead at age 36. His family buried him in a high meadow near his home. Once Jonathan’s grief had subsided, he began to reflect on the meaning of George’s untimely passing. He even wondered if the otherworldly signs given to him had been real after all. Jonathan soon became “profound[ly] skeptical,” discounting the validity of “specters, witches and spiritual admonitions and tokens.” But his mind was not quite settled. “Notwithstanding this conclusion,” he wrote, “I cannot say but what frequent silent whisperings admonished me otherwise, which I could not at all times pass unheeded.”
Beyond the ordinary obsequies that had been observed for George, Jonathan would soon find another way to come to terms with his loss.
1.1. Jonathan Koons and John Tippie Jr. joined a tide of westward migration during the nineteenth century. The solid line shows Koons’s movement from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Illinois; the broken line depicts his intended destination in Missouri. The white line shows Tippie’s disastrous relocation to Bleeding Kansas. The actual routes the families took between 1835 and 1858 are not known. Map by Sandy Plunkett.
1.2. Jonathan and Abigail Koons, ca. 1852–55. Photograph courtesy of Brandon Hodge, MysteriousPlanchette.com.
1.3. Nahum Koons, shown here with his father ca. 1852–55, when Nahum, born in 1837, would have been in his mid- to late teens. Photograph courtesy of Brandon Hodge, MysteriousPlanchette.com.
Koons Cemetery, 1939
4.1a. Tombstones in Koons Cemetery as they appeared in 1939, looking northeast. William E. Peters Papers, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
4.1b. Vista of Koons cemetery as it appeared in 1939, looking north. William E. Peters Papers, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
4.1c. This 1939 photograph shows the headstone of George S. Koons, Jonathan’s younger brother, who was 36 when he died in 1850. As the administrator of George’s estate, Jonathan helped the widow, Chloe Weimer Koons, settle the family’s financial affairs. William E. Peters Papers, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
4.1d. This 1939 photograph shows the headstone of Jonathan and Abigail’s beloved 12-year-old daughter, Filenia. William E. Peters Papers, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
1.5. Alfred Ryors, Ohio University president (1848–52) and a Presbyterian minister, who declined to preach the funeral of Koons’s young daughter Filenia in 1851. Ryors’s wife, Louisa Walker Ryors, was among 106 people in Athens County who signed an 1854 petition asking the US government to scientifically study spiritualist phenomena. University Archives, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
1.6. In Jonathan Koons’s day Indian mounds and enclosures abounded in Athens County, as shown in this early surveyor’s map of the Wolf’s Plains complex just a few miles from the Koons home. Koons believed that he received messages from spirits of Native Americans and participated in excavating their burial sites on two occasions. Map by S. P. Hildreth reproduced from Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, 1848.
