from the prior generation’s hard-won experience.
As the old-timers would recall, the end of the Revolutionary War had left many American veterans, in the words of the historian Charles M. Walker, “with an abundance of liberty but no property, and their occupation gone.” In the Northeast many set their sights on the frontier west of the Alleghenies. Two veterans, Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, advertised their new firm, the Ohio Company of Associates, in the hope of raising the capital necessary to purchase western lands from the United States government. After several investors bought subscriptions and the firm completed negotiations with Congress in 1787, the Ohio Company bought 1.5 million acres in the Appalachian foothills of the future state of Ohio. The acreage lay just north of the Ohio River, with Virginia on the other side. The entrepreneurs planted their initial settlement at Marietta at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers in 1788, giving that city the distinction of being the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory.
To reach the frontier from the Northeast, the so-called Wilderness Yankees had to move their belongings by wagon to the headwaters of the Ohio near Pittsburgh, where flatboats or large canoes could be sent downriver. The 48 pioneers in the first group—all men—floated down the river to the mouth of the Muskingum, where they erected a fort called Campus Martius. Tall tales—both inviting and ominous—soon spread back East by word of mouth. These legends told how brandy flowed from underground springs, how cloth grew on trees, and how poisonous hoop snakes could chase the unsuspecting to their deaths. Mostly, though, the fertility of the land was an enticement that overcame the threat of animal or Indian attack—the saying went that the rich Ohio farmland “needed only to be tickled with the hoe to laugh with the harvest.”
The settlers had kept coming, not only from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania but from Virginia and Kentucky as well. By 1790 Marietta boasted 100 cabins, and a second outpost had been established farther west at Cincinnati. The Delaware, Shawnee, and other Indian tribes were not about to go quietly, however, when confronted with the loss of their hunting grounds. In response to stepped-up attacks from the native people, the federal government sent troops to drive out the estimated 15,000 Indians living in the future state of Ohio. Two US armies were roundly defeated, but a third, led by General Anthony Wayne, crushed a confederation of Indian tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in western Ohio in 1794. The Indians were forced to cede all but the northwest corner of Ohio to the government in the Treaty of Greenville. Soon the unbroken forest would ring with axes as the trees were felled to make way for farmland.
In this postwar period settlers spread out from Marietta into the interior of the vast Ohio Company purchase. Meandering across southeast Ohio on a northwest to southeast diagonal was the placid river the Delaware Indians had called Hockhocking, or bottle river. The Hockhocking and its tributaries, fringed by white-barked sycamores, soon became rolling highways. In 1797 several families from Marietta ascended the Hockhocking and established the first permanent settlement in what would become Athens County. They paddled as far as the present-day town of Athens, said to be “40 miles by water from the Ohio.” Others attempting an overland route had to navigate through virgin forest where oaks, maples, and hickories towered above and raccoons and red foxes scampered below among thickets of sassafras, dogwood, witch hazel, pawpaw, and hornbeam. They quickly subdued the land. The last buffalo was captured and put in a traveling show in 1799, and bears and wolves were hunted down and scalped for bounty money. By the time Koons arrived in 1834, other towns and settlements dotted the county map. The Indians had been forced out decades before, giving way to European excavators who would uncover treasures of stone, copper, and shell that the ancestors of the exiled Native Americans had secreted in burial mounds. A nascent saltworks—soon to become the dominant industry of the county—had supplanted one of the Indians’ former haunts where Sunday Creek joined the Hockhocking.
Why Jonathan Koons chose this place above all others he visited in Ohio is not clear. Perhaps he felt at home in the hilly landscape, which may have reminded him of mountainous Bedford County and the Juniata River that flows through it. He set his sights on acreage 7 miles outside Athens, a tract that was too steep to be considered prime farmland but could be had for as little as 25 cents an acre. In his autobiography he merely said: “Enroute for home, I purchased the property upon which I now reside, without a dollar to advance on the contract—save a rifle worth about seven dollars, which I had procured in exchange for an old silver watch, during my sojourn in Athens County. This exchange [for the rifle] was made for the purpose of enabling me to sport amongst the Athen’s hills that abounded with game at that time.”
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
