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 and living expenses. He promised to compensate students “at a reasonable price” for cultivating the donated land around the school. He had a soft spot for impoverished scholars, who could “pay in whole by their labor if they should wish[,] for it is given for that express purpose and for no other.” Bishop also authorized the trustees to “erect shops” on the school grounds and to “furnish materials for mechanics, for the same purpose: also, furnish places and stock for female labor, sewing, braiding, and all such other kinds of labor as may be deemed expedient.”
Bishop did not explain why he had decided to locate the seminary within Abigail’s land. Could he have expected that she, as the unmarried schoolteacher daughter, would play a role in the new school? Or was it simply the best location on which to build? Whatever her father’s intention, Abigail soon leased the 40-acre plot surrounding the proposed school grounds back to her parents for their lifetime use, “in consideration of the love good will and affection” she had for her “honored Father and Mother.” The rent was to consist of “one ear of corn to be paid to me my heirs or assigns from year to year on the first day of January” and only “when demanded.” After her marriage Abigail would sell this land back to her parents, retaining a separate tract of over 100 acres as her inheritance.
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SHORTLY after Koons’s move to Ohio, his mother, Margaret, fell gravely ill back in Pennsylvania. Though he was far away, Koons felt a close tie to her, writing that she was “as honest, amiable, kind and affectionate a mother as ever graced the earth.” As she lay dying, Margaret told the family she could not go peacefully without one final visit with Jonathan, to whom, in his words, she had always extended “one of the most tender threads of her affection.” There was not enough time to send a letter bidding her son to come home, so it appeared her final wish could not be granted. As friends and relatives gathered around the unconscious woman to witness her final breath, Jonathan Koons was having a synchronistic vision. As he later wrote: “Her spirit left its senseless tenement a sufficient length of time to pay me a visit in Ohio, three hundred miles distant, and then returned back, and reanimated her frail remains, that had been partially adjusted with the funeral habiliments, and delivered the unexpected tidings of her visit, in the relation of which she announced that she had now seen me, and was prepared to depart in peace. She even related what I was engaged at, and the condition of my person, which proved to be strictly true.”
Jonathan’s brother Lewis wrote to him soon after their mother’s death. He was curious to confirm Margaret’s account—seemingly gained by clairvoyance. Jonathan swore to Lewis that his mother’s information was correct in all respects.
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UPON their marriage in October 1836, Jonathan and Abigail, both 25, set up housekeeping in Amestown, a farming settlement some 10 miles distant from the patch of virgin forest in Dover Township that they would eventually call home. Koons continued to work as a carpenter for paying customers while slowly carving out a working farm on their own land, which by now had swelled to 522 acres, the result of a second real estate purchase he had made that summer.
Except for floods along Federal Creek, Amestown and the surrounding Ames Township had much to recommend to the young couple. Pioneers arriving there in 1798 in dugout canoes had brought with them progressive values that included an emphasis on education. One of the earliest schools had Harvard graduates on the faculty and students reciting the words of Cassius and Brutus at a school assembly. According to the 1833 Ohio Gazette, the township “contains two stores, a number of mills, a handsome brick Presbyterian meeting house, two brick school houses, [and] an incorporated circulating library.” Before the end of the decade the village of Amesville would be officially established, but even that designation did not relieve women of the necessity of crossing the main street on horseback when the thoroughfare was muddy, thus keeping their skirts and pantalets dry.
The idea of a circulating library might
