Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24

Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24

Jeff Gill

An extended consideration of the life and times of Patrick Cunningham

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Who was Patrick Cunningham?

He's a pioneering figure in the history of Licking County.

Born in Ireland, he came to America early enough to have fought in the American Revolution with the Pennsylvania Militia.

Somehow, he ends up alone, a widower, perhaps twice over, in what will become known as Granville Township by 1801; the next fall, in October of 1802, he helps John Jones bury his wife Lillie before leaving to retreat with his children into the Marietta, Ohio area, as a near neighbor to the east willing to offer the last assistance one can offer.

Within a few more years, he takes it upon himself to dig Lillie Jones back up, and move her remains to Newark, Ohio's newly formalized burying ground, so that the "Nash cabin," once the Jones family home, is innocent of mortuary significance by the time the Granville Land Company settlers arrive in November of 1805. Just to the east the outlines of the Cunningham cabin and orchard can still be traced along the hillside to the turn of the century, hints still visible in today's Munson Springs Reserve.

A year or so after her postmortem trip to Newark, Lillie Jones will be dug up and moved once more, back to the west, to the newly laid out Old Colony Burying Ground, established by Granville's settlers, not the first burial there but ironically the oldest.

Meanwhile, Patrick Cunningham, veteran of the Revolution, has established himself in Newark, and became bailiff and jailer for the newly established Licking County Common Pleas Court after 1808. Now called "Paddy" as the county jailer and bailiff, he resides with his likely third wife at the new county jail south of Gen. Schenck's carefully surveyed Courthouse Square. He will outlive her, and bury her at Newark's Sixth Street Cemetery; his son William, who will fight in the War of 1812 and survive a siege and battle outside Fort Detroit, but will be an early interment at Franklinton's old cemetery in 1815 as he tried to return home, now just across the Scioto from Columbus and not far from lower.com Field today. A son of William, John Cunningham would serve as a deputy sheriff, deputy auditor, and perhaps the earliest attendance officer or "enumerator" for Newark schools before his death in 1884.

Meanwhile, having outlived both children and wives, Patrick Cunningham will end his days in the care of a brother in the vicinity of what is now Hebron, Ohio, in southern Licking County. A son of Theophilus Rees, the first Welsh settler of Granville Township in 1802, with the same name as his father, will become an original settler of Hebron and at the historic Licking Baptist Cemetery off Beaver Run there are Cunningham brothers and nephews and other relatives marked, with a single unmarked grave in their midst likely that of Patrick, living out his last days into his late 80s in that vicinity, buried there in 1832.

Patrick Cunningham would have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were leading citizens of Newark as Licking County grew, but by 1936 the last of his descendants are gone. Cunningham is no longer a pioneer name to reckon with, but his role in our earliest days as a community is worth remembering.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; tell him about pieces of the puzzle he might have missed at @knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.