Religion, too, was in ferment; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a wave of religious fervor called the Second Great Awakening had swept across the United States and on to the frontier. Along with a renewed emphasis on a personal relationship with the Savior, some Christian believers looked forward to a new millennial age, all the while working to purify society so that Christ could return to Earth.
Nowhere was this revivalism more prevalent than in western New York, where spiritualism was born in 1848. This region eventually became known as the Burned-Over District because so many religious fires had swept the population that few people were left to convert. The Second Great Awakening not only fueled Protestant denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists but spurred the rise of churches that believed in direct communication with spirits. The Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, for one, had long been known for their ecstatic rites—whirling and stamping dances and speaking in tongues, as well as their propensity to fall under the influence of spirits as they worshipped. Mediums, also called instruments, heard from entities as diverse as Napoleon, Native Americans, and even neighbors who appeared at their own funerals to console the living. And in 1823 an angel had appeared to Joseph Smith, revealing to him the location of inscribed golden tablets buried near Palmyra, New York, and providing the foundational text for the Mormon religion. Other residents of the Burned-Over District had once discarded their worldly possessions, believing the preacher William Miller’s prediction that Jesus Christ would return to Earth no later than March 21, 1844.
The desire to cleanse a wicked world in advance of the Second Coming also spilled over into the social arena. Reformers in central and western New York, some inspired by their Christian faith, sought to improve society across a broad swath of issues affecting the here-and-now, not just the hereafter. The first women’s rights convention ever held in the United States took place in 1848 in Seneca Falls, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton shocked listeners with her demand for the vote. Intertwined with the women’s movement were campaigns for temperance, prison reform, and the abolition of slavery. Utopian societies also flourished there for a time, experimenting with new ways to live. When the sisters Kate and Maggie Fox introduced spiritualism into the cauldron, it must have seemed just as plausible as other “isms” that residents had entertained over the years.
Spiritualism began in a rented farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, where Kate, Maggie, and their parents heard mysterious noises in the night. Soon Kate, 11, and Maggie, 15, reported that they could communicate with the spirit of a murdered peddler through raps—two for yes and silence for no. Within weeks, hundreds of curiosity seekers had visited the farmhouse, upsetting the Foxes’ daily routines but ensuring notoriety for the two girls. Shepherded by their older sister, Leah, the pair first moved to Rochester and eventually wound up in New York City, where all three siblings became internationally famous mediums known as the Rochester Rappers.
Now, just a few years after the Fox sisters had made their debut, Jonathan Koons was attracting an ardent following. Most visitors, like a Cincinnati businessman delving into the séances, came away convinced that the ghostly hands and unearthly music were “the work of an invisible intelligent power.” “Hundreds, and I believe thousands, (judging from a register kept there) have been there from almost all parts of the United States,” the businessman wrote, “and I have yet to hear of the first one who has gone away skeptical as to the genuineness of the performance.”
Even so, the French mesmerist Barthet was left to wonder about what he had heard and seen. The velvety blackness of the séance room seemed to produce sheer magic, but returning to the light sent questions seesawing through his mind. Barthet tumbled the evidence over and over as he left Athens County, never to return. Was Jonathan Koons a martyr for the spiritualist cause, an unlikely scientist harnessing yet unknown powers of the universe, or—as his critics charged—merely a charlatan of the highest order? Answering these questions would not be easy. But from 1852 on, the spiritualist movement would claim Jonathan Koons as one of its most charismatic figures—a backwoods seer whose legacy would rival even that of the famous Fox sisters for a place in its history.
2
“The Place of My Nativity”
IN THE fall of 1833, 22-year-old Jonathan Koons set out to see a new world. He was bound for the Ohio Country, where the corn was said to grow 14 feet high in the river bottoms and the juice of wild strawberries could reach a horse’s knees. Venturing out from his home near Bedford, Pennsylvania, he traveled first to Pittsburgh and then to Mercer, Pennsylvania, on the Ohio border, where his two uncles lived. Over the next several months he would traipse through 14 Ohio counties, eventually finding the one in which he would cast his fortune as an adult.
Koons was not alone in his desire to see the western lands. For over 30 years his fellow Pennsylvania Germans had been crossing the mountains in search of new opportunities. The pace had accelerated in 1811—the year Koons was born—with the start of construction of the National Road at Cumberland, Maryland. Even then the presence of Pennsylvania Germans was considerable in places like Lancaster, Ohio, in the southeast, where signs were printed in both English and German, and settlers could peruse a German-language newspaper. “I enjoyed this trip very much—scarcely a day passed by, but what I met with some friend or acquaintance from the place of my nativity,” Koons wrote.
His trip was something of a rite of passage. He had just completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner—surely a handy trade in a new land where buildings were multiplying and Ohio’s population was nearing one million. Two and a half years earlier, when he had left home for the first time at age 19, Koons had apprenticed himself to a master carpenter, Elias Gump of Reinsburg, Pennsylvania. The small town (now spelled Rainsburg) was located in a valley called Friends Cove, about 11 miles south of Bedford toward the Maryland state line. Along the town square Gump had built a house and a carpenter shop where his employees turned out cabinets. In addition to acquiring the fine woodworking skills of a joiner, Koons had learned how to play the fiddle while in Reinsburg. As he would later write, a “vast plain of social relations” soon opened up to him: “The love of music was also a prominent feature of my character which led me into a practical performance of the same. It was not long until I acquired an admirable degree in the skill of its performance—which became an agreeable source of recreation, and it also opened a channel through which I gained admission in social society and assemblies that would have denied me admittance under any other qualification, except wealth and pomposity.” With his connections in the carpentry business and his newfound talent for music, Koons soon found himself feasting at a cultural banquet. “These humble professions gained me admittance to . . . public orations, delivered by patriotic and able minds at military picnics, festivals and balls,” he wrote. “They also opened my way into social family circles, private halls, [singing] parties, discussions, religious assemblies, weddings, huskings, raisings, theatrical performances, etc., etc., which were constant contributors to my little store of practical, experimental[,] exemplary, and theoretic knowledge. Scarcely an act or idea ever escaped my consideration.”
Whether he brought his fiddle along on the journey is not known, but he certainly carried his curiosity with him as he made his way south through Ohio in 1833. In Canton he could not resist joining the multitudes who flocked to see a murderer hanged in the public square. That November, while boarding at New Harrisburg, in Carroll County, he stumbled half-dressed into the street to witness a spectacular nighttime meteor shower but was equally fascinated by the reaction of the townspeople—“some were praying, some laughing, some weeping, and others mocking; while at the same time the surrounding elements seemed all on fire.” Years later he was able to joke: “Thinks I, surely, Hughes and Miller [millennialists] are true prophets; and they only made a slight mistake in computing the time of the destruction of the world by