1863-1882 EE Johnson's Early Life: Growing up in Coshocton County, Ohio

Ernest Edgar Johnson grew up in the farming community of White Eyes Township in Coshocton County, Ohio, where he was born on his parent's farm on September 7th, 1863.^[1] The American Civil War had been raging for two years, and hundreds of volunteers from the county had joined the Union Army. Thankfully the bloody battles were far away from Ohio. 

Ernest was the ninth and last child of Jesse Newport and Martha Jane (nee Dinsmore) Johnson, but at the time of Ernest’s birth only two of the Johnson children were still alive: Grace 6 and three-year-old Charley. Disease had taken a terribly toll on the Johnson family. The year before Ernest was born, Grace and Charley contracted scarlet fever. The disease left Grace with "some bad effects, slow to disappear". Charley "never recovered from the ill effects of it. One of his legs was badly affected, and his mentality was lowered."^[2] Ernest would make it through his childhood unscathed by disease. 

The Johnson's farm, covering 204½ acres of gentle hills, was one of the larger farms in White Eyes Township. The farm straddled a small country lane. A creek ran through part of the western side of the property. 39 acres were still "unimproved" woodland. Over 200 sheep, raised for their wool, grazed on the farm pastures as did a few milch cows and other cattle. There were several dozen barnyard poultry and a few swine. The Johnsons grew hay, wheat, Indian corn, and some Irish potatoes. They had 300 apple trees and 100 peach trees, and kept honey bees. This mixture and variety of livestock and crops was typical.^[3]

A mile south was a little village called Avondale, now known as Fresno.^[4] A mile north was Kimball’s Methodist Episcopal Church where Ernest's mother was a faithful member.^[5]

The nearest significant town was Coshocton, about eight miles away to the southwest—a significant distance in those days. "Few were the families that could afford…a [horse-drawn] buggy. More modest vehicles in the way of light wagons that could navigate muddy clay roads and swim rivers were the prevailing style, with here and there a hardy dweller who still clung to the ox team and mud schooner on wheels for his fancy visiting round the neighborhood."^[6]

1872 Map showing the Johnson's property in White Eyes Township, Coshocton County, Ohio

A considerable part of Coshocton County was settled by Germans, particularly in White Eyes Township. “Their ministers preached to them in their native language, and their boys and girls studied the German testament in school. The ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ dialect was spoken; all their thinking was in it; all life outside the schoolroom was discussed in that German dialect, so it could scarcely be otherwise than that generations grew up almost as thoroughly German as those who first came to the county in the early [eighteen] thirties.”^[7] There was even a German language newspaper in Coshocton. Ernest had these German-American children as playmates and learned to speak their "awful German" dialect which he could still speak as an elderly man.^[8]

In his later years, Ernest recalled childhood adventures "when the hills glistened in their blanket of snow, tramping with a merry troop of neighborhood boys over woody ridges all armed to the teeth with bows and arrows, hot on the trail of the hated redskin. Sometimes we fell so low in mind and morale that we loosed our nail-pointed shafts at scudding cottontails, though our fancy generally was for bigger game."^[9]

The Johnson children attended a small local school where they learned to read and write with Eclectic Readers, widely used textbooks informally known as the McGuffey Readers^[10] that reflected the customs and ideals of the frontier people.

Pages from McGuffey Readers

Ernest's parents strongly believed in the importance of being educated.^[11] As a young man, Ernest's father, Jesse, had even taught school for several years.^[12] Education would give Ernest options in life other than being on the farm.

Despite being a large and powerfully built man, Jesse was "not always robust in health. As early as 1862 he had his land cultivated on the shares, being unable to do heavy work himself."^[13] A week after Ernest turned 5 years old, Jesse died. "One report said, by bloody flux [dysentery], an excruciatingly painful disease that in those days was very common. Another report gave the cause of death as 'inflamation [sic] of the stomach'."^[14] The family buried Jesse in Kimball Cemetery near the grave of his and his wife Martha's 10-year-old son, Roy,^[15] who had died of diphtheria two months before Ernest was born.^[16] 

Ernest’s widowed mother Martha was a very capable woman and continued to successfully run the farm with the help of a hired hand boarded at the Johnson's home.^[17] She even instituted crop rotation.^[18] No doubt, the children had their chores on the farm to do.

Martha had a strong, dominating personality,^[19] but her daughter Grace said of her, "She is a good mother and never scolds".^[20] Grace, however, was not especially assertive. When Grace was 16 years old, Martha arranged Grace’s marriage to 28-year-old John McCullough Adams. Martha probably thought she was making a good decision for her daughter. John was the son of a well-to-do neighboring farmer. But apparently, the marriage was not a particularly happy one.^[21]

Three years after marrying, John and Grace left farming and moved into the town of Coshocton where John became a stock dealer, principally in horses.^[22] Martha sent Ernest to live with them in town so that he could attend high school which was just a short walk from his sister's new home. Charley, Ernest’s older brother who was not as scholastically capable or interested in schooling as Ernest, remained on the farm with their mother.^[23]

Ernest lived in his sister's household with her young and growing family for about four years while he attended high school.^[24] The recently built school in Coshocton where Ernest attended had over 600 pupils enrolled over 12 year levels, four in each of the three departments: primary, grammar and high. Education beyond basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, however, was not yet common. Demands of life were often too heavy in other directions to allow much time or means for it.^[25] Few went on to study at the high school level. Ernest was one of the few. The first graduating class for the high school at Coshocton was that of 1879 with only 6 members. Ernest's graduating class of 1882 had 15 members—9 boys and 6 girls.^[26]  

After graduating, Ernest set out for Colorado.

First published 23 September 2023. Last updated 8 September 2024.