A Personal Note

I first found the story of the lynching of the Frenches, for the murder of Lake Jones, on eBay.  Somebody was selling a copy of the St. Louis Globe for $150 or more, and they said it had a story, reprinted from the Cincinnati Enquirer, of a Warsaw lynching in it.  I wasn't going to pay $150, but they listed the date of the story, so I headed for the Cincinnati Library to read the Enquirer of that date to see if I could run down the story.  As you can tell, I found it.

At the end of the story, it says that Lake Jones had, in the days of slavery, been owned by a Howard, and that the Howards agreed to put him in their family cemetery.

That rang a bell, because I have relatives from Gallatin County named Howard.  My mother's father's (William Prior Crouch, of  Glencoe) mother was a Howard.  Her mother was a Jones.  Did Lake Jones originally belong to my ancestors?

Yes.  I found him in the census living with my Howards in 1870, and an unnamed slave of his age is with them in the 1840 census. 

And his burial?  The Howard cemetery is on a hill outside of Glencoe.  Go north out of Glencoe on Sugar Creek road (US 127), and turn left onto Johnson Road.  There's a new road, with some new homes, that turns off to the left.  All of those houses are on what used to be Jacob Howard's farm, later acquired through marriage/inherited by the Crouch's.  The family cemetery is in good shape, off to the right of this new road.

Lake Jones doesn't have a marker, and until now, nobody in our family even knew he was there.  Maybe he  isn't, but I've got a photocopy of a page from a 125 year old newspaper that says he might be.