images, if useful

First the newer replacement stone from 1935, now in Old Colony Burying Ground, and a general and close-up view of the older marker now at the Granville Historical Society Museum:

Notes from my Knapsack 8-8-24

Notes from my Knapsack 8-8-24

Jeff Gill

An awkward phrase, a hidden history

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During the Fourth of July Street Fair (and hurrah to Granville Kiwanis for another wonderful week of community fun) I took a break from the heat and sat on the side porch of the Granville Historical Society, thinking about wording.

I recently shared some of my research around Patrick Cunningham, a shadowy figure if in bold strokes found in Granville's and Licking County's earliest written history.

He has generally been relegated to a secondary, if poignant role around the Jones family as pioneer settlers here who . . . okay, and this is where wording gets awkward. They are called "the first White family" in Granville Township, and while John and Lillie Jones came here in 1801 with two daughters and a son, their fourth child, named for Lillie's father Jonathan Benjamin Jones, was born Oct. 1, 1802 and is called the "first White child born" in the area as well.

Sadly, Lillie dies just a few weeks later, and with Patrick Cunningham's help, John buries his wife and takes the four children back to the Marietta area, where later he would remarry and live out his life, most of the children growing up to move to Illinois. Neighbor Cunningham is notable as I've already explained for re-locating Lillie's remains not once but twice in deference to her family's wishes.

The third burial site, in Granville's Old Colony Burying Ground, makes her the earliest death but not the first burial there, given her circuitous route from Newark-Granville Road to downtown old Newark and back to Granville after those settlers came in 1805. And the marker on her third grave is in fact the second one there; we don't know what rude monument was placed at her first burial site, and there's a chance the older Granville marker was placed on her brief resting place in Newark, then traveled with her remains to her current location. Whatever the earlier story, sometime after coming to Granville, in the very late 1800s, her marker was stolen. The granite tombstone today was placed in 1935, but using the recorded inscription from the older monument . . . which turned up later, and is now on the side porch of the village museum.

You can dimly trace along the bottom those words, uncomfortable to read today: "This is the 1st White family that ever inhabited Granville Tp." There's an overtone to that choice of words which makes today's reader uneasy.

Yet there's two pieces of information I would pull out of that uncomfortable phrase. There is a certain seeking after pre-eminence in that "1st" (as the older stone has it, "First" in the 1935 replacement), but in saying "1st White" family or birth, there's an implicit acknowledgement that there were people, families, and births here before 1801. It was unambiguously understood that Native Americans, "Red Men" in the racist term of the times, had been here, built, thrived, loved, and died. Until 1830 settler accounts would talk of "Indian visitors" passing through on a regular basis. So the monumentalists knew there were previous inhabitants, hence the queasy precision of "1st White family."

And that second qualifier: if they were the first "family," that makes me wonder. In fact, re-reading the earliest accounts, you can get the impression that 50 year old widower Patrick Cunningham in his solitary cabin was here . . . first. Had built up the slope, a little closer to the spring, and was present to welcome the Jones family, perhaps helping them to build their cabin about 20 rods, or 110 yards further south at the foot of the hill.

I wonder.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's finding Patrick Cunningham a fascinating if elusive quarry. Tell him what keeps you looking for more information at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 8-2-24

Faith Works 8-2-24

Jeff Gill

On taking offense in a constructive fashion

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There's piety, and there's discipleship.

I wouldn't want to say they can't and don't overlap. They often do.

My personal piety runs to practices that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to any person interested in my faith; not all Christians follow the same devotional habits nor would I say they should. You could make a case that, especially in our public faith, any thing we do or say should be at least potentially a recommendation to others, a sort of evangelistic statement in deed and word.

The Apostle Paul famously complicated this question with his statements about marriage, which (at that point in his life, anyhow) he said was not for him, but others might be different. You can look that one up.

In a church I served, we had a program on Bible reading which I supported, adding in an option for listening in your car to your scripture passages on cassette tapes. Someone came to me, sincerely but rather insistently, arguing that this was a mistake: people should read a printed Bible while sitting still, or it didn't count. I pointed out Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch's situation where the latter was reading Isaiah while riding in a chariot, and the reaction was not a happy one to my comparison.

Piety may well be a worn leather-bound King James Version, but discipleship is being well-versed in the Bible, however you access the text. I think we can get general consensus on this.

Piety would include, I'd argue, faithfulness to my word, including my wedding vows; discipleship means extending grace and opening paths into church life for those whose lives may have followed some crooked paths, not always of their choosing. More bluntly, I strongly affirm fidelity in marriage, but I think we've learned that when the church becomes an army that shoots its wounded, and casts off anyone who's been through a divorce as unworthy for membership, let alone leadership, it runs the risk of preaching only to the converted, of being the proverbial "museum for saints, not a hospital for sinners."

I was thinking about this subject because of my recent writings about how faith communities can promote trust, and an intersection with my historical researches venturing into an orphanage effort in my religious tradition in the 1890s. A strong woman in leadership opened up a "foundling hospital" and welcomed abandoned mothers, but was driven out of her role when she refused to bar unmarried mothers from her facility. Married men, of course, were the group that ushered her out the door; she went on to start over and open up a home for mothers in need of all sorts.

My first thought on reading this was "I wonder about those men." It's unfair, perhaps, but I couldn't stop myself from suspecting that not all of those men had been chaste in their singleness or faithful in marriage themselves. Maybe they were. And in wanting to promote marriage and commitment, they took their piety and pushed it over onto how they wanted both discipleship and mission to be practiced, shoving mercy to one side.

More locally, I have been puzzling for months now over a billboard on a major highway, overlooking a field soon to host high school sports, with two toothbrushes in a cup and the oblique legend (on first reading, at least, to the naive) "Conserve energy. Shack up."

The folks behind #TheEnvironmentExcuse want to be clever, certainly not pious, about climate change. To do so they toy with an issue I think is near to my sense of discipleship. I'm not advocating a return to social stigma around cohabitation, but I can't help but wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general, and feel discomfort because it's against the goals I would want our youth to see held up.

What do you think?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on his piety and discipleship every day, with mixed results. Tell him how you'd like to decorate a billboard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

[In case you care . . .