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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,”