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 windows to admit the light, and fitted up with rough benches. Such shelter was sought in cold weather. In the summer, the congregation generally assembled in the open air under the spreading branches of the trees, where, seated on benches hastily prepared for the occasion, they listened to the welcome message of the traveling preacher, who was either an independent missionary or sent on a missionary tour by the body to which he belonged.
One such voice crying in the wilderness was that of John Chapman, the woodsman and tree planter better known as Johnny Appleseed. Born in Massachusetts in 1774, he became a living legend on the American frontier, walking thousands of miles across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana not only to plant apple trees but to spread the spiritual teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Chapman was a follower of the eminent Swedish scientist and mystic whose philosophy inspired generations after his death in 1772. He had converted to the Swedenborgian church, called the Church of the New Jerusalem (or just New Church), while living in Pennsylvania. Although he was a businessman who sold seedlings and saplings to the pioneers, Chapman also was a pacifist, vegetarian, and deeply religious man who distributed Swedenborg’s texts all across the frontier. Upon arriving at a settlement, Chapman would shout, “News! Fresh from heaven!” as he handed out chapters of the books and collected pages that had already been read. When he was invited into a local home to spend the night, he would sit around the fire extolling the virtues of his faith.
Chapman probably told his hosts about Swedenborg’s great renown as a clairvoyant back in his native land, how in 1759 the seer had remotely viewed Stockholm in flames from 250 miles away—long before couriers could deliver news of the fire. Swedenborg believed that, in addition to this psychic gift, he had been specially chosen as a channel for communication with spirits of dead human beings that inhabited various rungs of heaven and hell. In his view, dead souls abiding in heaven had an existence much the same as they had on Earth except they now were not burdened by sin. This spiritual world was reflected in the physical world; everyday things harbored a deeper hidden meaning. The Bible, too, contained symbolic meanings and could be interpreted in a radically different way by considering the correspondences woven into its language. Above all, the “good news” Chapman was spreading was Swedenborg’s promise that salvation was open to all, that people had some measure of control over their final destiny. In fact, it would be the recently dead individual, rather than God, who would review earthly deeds and judge him or herself accordingly. This was a message that spiritualists would embrace in due time.
Chapman had begun his wanderings in Ohio as early as 1801. He refined his business practices into what became a familiar ritual: he would collect seeds from commercial cider presses, identify places in the wilderness that he thought would be settled in a year or two, and plant orchards in those areas. Though he often lived in the forest with little shelter, Chapman sometimes built cabins or bought property to use as a base for his operations or simply as an investment. For three decades he owned land in eight Ohio counties and planted
