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.
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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.
4
“A Striking Specimen of Beauty”
IN THE very first years of settlement, the wild reaches of southeastern Ohio must have seemed like an American Eden, a place where believers could distill Christianity to its purest essence. Far from the religion of the Old World, with its prescribed rituals, they were free to improvise when it came to worship. One Athens County pioneer recalled,
There were no churches or meeting-houses in the county. Religious services, when any were had, were held in some private dwelling, or barn, or perhaps rude school house with oiled-paper