The records of Athens County, however, do not mention any of the colorful details that Koons has supplied. They say simply that in February 1834 Koons bought 262 acres in Dover Township. He paid $65 to James and Lucinda Fuller for the tract. Whether by impulse or careful design, Koons had started the trip as a tourist; now, at only 22, he had become a landowner.
Koons returned to Bedford in the spring of 1834 and worked as a joiner to raise cash for the farm in the Ohio Country; he supplemented his income by teaching school the following winter. By the spring of 1835 he was ready to cross the mountains a second time, to Athens County where his own land awaited him.
3
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.
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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