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 fire.”
* * *
IN a letter Koons described his father’s side of the family as being “of German extraction throughout.” In the Old World the family name may have been spelled Countz. Upon reaching the colonies the family used the German spelling of Koontz, but later generations took up the more Americanized spelling of Koons. Jonathan’s father, Peter, who fought against the British in a German unit in the Revolutionary War, had settled with his wife, Margaret Snyder, on Clear Ridge in Bedford County, Pennsylvania.
Growing up on his parents’ farm with four brothers and five sisters, Jonathan was a sickly child, given to physical ailments and prone to anxiety and depression. “I became afflicted with rheumatic affections at an early age, by exposure and hard labor, which caused my aching limbs at times to disobey the volition of mind in the discharge of their physical office,” he recalled in his 1856 autobiography. “This in effect afflicted the mind also, and I would have ofttimes cheerfully dispensed with my frail physical bark, and launched my mental existence upon the mysterious ocean of a future state.” The only thing that kept him from suicide was the thought of the “horrible scenes and penalities” that religion prescribed.
Peter Koons was from the “old school Presbyterian church,” and accordingly the infant Jonathan was baptized there, among the Friends Cove congregation. But his Lutheran mother, Margaret, provided most of his religious instruction at home. “The first education I received on the subject of man’s immortality, or soul, was impressed on my mind by my kind and affectionate mother,” he wrote. Margaret taught her son Bible stories about the Creation, the flood that wiped wickedness from the earth, Jonah and the whale, Joseph with his coat of many colors, and the downfall of Sampson. From the New Testament she related Christ’s miracles and his mission of redeeming humanity from original sin. “In that age I did not doubt the correctness of all she taught out of her rule of faith—being at that time led by her fascinating charms into implicit confidence of all she declared unto me,” Koons explained.
Despite the trust he had in his mother’s wisdom, young Jonathan was nonetheless possessed of a questioning mind. As he grew older, he wrote, “I was considered a tedious pupil, in consequence of being prone to inquire into all the whys and wherefores of my mental attractions, while under the instruction of my preceptors.” This contrariness caused problems for the boy, as his mother had taught him that God would hold him accountable for “every idle thought” as well as for words and deeds. To covet someone’s property was just as bad as actually stealing it, and “the conception of a false conclusion was the same in effect with God, as if we had proclaimed it.” Jonathan persisted nonetheless; “every pebble in the pathway of my life was turned up under the expectation of finding an index to true knowledge,” he would later write. He asked his mother why God had created hell and the devil. Her answer was that God was an “unfathomable mystery”—and to doubt his word was to sin against the Holy Ghost, “which sin cannot be ratified under the atonement of Christ, neither in this world, or in the future state of man.”
Over the course of these lessons Jonathan became convinced he was going to hell, a certainty that propelled him to a mental health crisis. He told of a short period in his youth (no age given) when he became anxious at bedtime—“a haunted and fearful condition.” He could not sleep, he said, for fear that “Satan would snatch me from the arms of kind Morpheus.” Jonathan would ask his mother to pray with him. She would oblige and tell him a Bible story, which would usually put him to sleep. But the boy’s dreams were filled with “horned and cloven footed devils” that dragged his playmates into hell with evident delight. Jonathan dreamed they were chasing him, too, and he would wake up in the act of jumping out of bed. The nighttime terrors soon became so strong that sunlight could no longer dispel them, and he sank into a deep melancholy from which his loved ones could not arouse him. “This sad predicament of my mind caused me to sob and sigh aloud,” he recalled. “All the kind entreaties of the family for an explanation of the cause, were made in vain.”
Finally, Jonathan fell into a trancelike state in which he imagined that a stranger—“a pure and noble personage”—was leading him through “successive plains [planes]” of heaven, where he recognized “the old prophets and patriarchs.” They eventually reached the zone of ultimate perfection, but Jonathan was allowed only to behold it without actually entering. He begged his guide to let him stay, but he had to go back to Earth to perform important duties before he could return.
When he woke up, Jonathan was troubled to find himself still in mortal form. “The thoughts of prolonging my days upon the earth after [this] experience, afflicted my mind very grievously,” he wrote. “This vision gave me a sort of foretaste of what I began to hope for; and the idea of spending my earthly career in such doubts and fears as those I had already experienced, was painful in the extreme.” Once again the boy turned to his mother for help. She listened intently as he told the story of his visit to the realm of light. “She informed me of her faith in the guardianship of angels, whom she believed hovered around us, and exercised their kind protecting influence in our favor, against temptations of Satan,” he recalled. At last Jonathan had
