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.
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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.
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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
