Jonah's Run Cemetery

About ten years ago, after Mom gave money for Jonah’s Run to get five acres of former Zephaniah/Matilda land, I tried, unsuccessfully, to expand the cemetery. Mom had picked out the spot, which I marked-fourteen 15-inch rows north of the seventh row of present tombstones. After church one Sunday, I put a white bucket on a steel fence post at the spot. She and I then went over to, now, Grismer’s, and sat on the front porch where many of you have seen us sit. It’s where she and Dad were married, in the house where she and her father were born.

She again looked to the SE where the Bullskin Trail ran, where the 1822 Public Meeting House was built with a cemetery on the SE corner of Underwood land where she used to pick wildflowers while Grandpapa cut the grass. Once, when I asked how her father cut it, she responded, “With a scythe, of course.” She noted where the Hatton House was, saying Dr. Hatton called it “Pleasant View” Farm. She again said that was because they looked down on four Underwood girls. She noted the Martin House. She pointed out where Ruth Sullivan, Charles Ellison’s mother, lived and remembered they walked to Jonah’s Run and to Haines School together, saying Ruth was her oldest friend. (Charles and I started to school together.)

She said she and her sisters watched out the front porch door for two older Doster boys to drive down Collett Road in their horse-drawn school wagon to pick them up on their way to Kingman School. She remembered that Aunt Sara used to wrap yarn around my Uncle Charles’ ear as he drove the horses. She pointed out the site of the Collett Blacksmith Shop, and said Kathleen Graham rode her dad’s farm team over there to get the horses’ hooves shod. She remembered the McCoy House on the corner-now the Collett House at Pioneer Village. And, she told more stories about Underwood involvement at Jonah’s Run-which I’ll add later. Then, she looked SE to the apple storage she said her father built at Zephaniah’s place, and on to the Tower House, where she remembered taking her first bath in an inside bathtub-saying Matilda built the first house in the county with an inside tub, but not with an inside toilet, because that was not considered to be clean.

After I pointed out the white bucket on the post behind the church, Mom again said, “This is the one spot in the world where everything is in the right place”. I agree. Perhaps we’ll figure out how to end a story on our Jonah’s Run website this way. Son, Dave, has reserved both .org and .com, and I plan to write articles this year for the local paper and the website regarding the 175th anniversary of JR. I will include some stuff that is in this doc .

Of course, I’m still thinking of how/when/where to increase the JR cemetery, including into the now Grismer Farm where I was born. Currently, I’m looking for an opportunity to interest Grismer’s to sell maybe two acres just west of the present cemetery, so as to extend now Collett Road north. Someday, SR 73 will be made four lane limited access, and I’d like to have that access be from an extended Collett Road.

Howard