Paul K. Jones
Paul K. Jones was the son of Mathew and Sarah Jones, born September 4, 1819. His youth was spent on the farm. At the age of nineteen, he began teaching in the Public schools of Adams and Scioto Counties. He traveled extensively through the West, over the greater part of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa. He returned to Ohio and married Elizabeth Clark, daughter of James Clark, of Jefferson Township, Adams County. They located near Des Moines, Iowa, where he was engaged in teaching, but after a residence of five years in that State, they returned to Adams County. He afterward purchased a farm just across the line in Scioto County, on which he continued to reside until his death.
Mr. Jones was a man of very strong convictions. Early in life he became an Abolitionist, his attention being fiist called to the subject by a party of slave hunters passing through where he was teaching. They returned with the fugitives manacled and driven before them. This object lesson made him the strongest kind of an Abolitionist. He engaged in many prominent debates on the slavery question. At the breaking out of the war, he felt that the result would be the abolition of slavery and that it was his duty to do all that he could to bring it about. He therefore enlisted in Company B, of the 70th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, on the fifteenth day of October, 1861. for a period of three years, at the age of forty-three, within three years of the limit. He served his three years and served as a veteran, and was discharged August 14, 1865. He was in all the battle and engagements of his company, and during that time acted also as a correspondent for several Northern newspapers. His stories of army life were read with great interest by all those within the circulation of the journals he represented. At the end of his military service he resumed the occupation of teaching. He was a man of high moral principles, of the strictest integrity, honorable in all his dealings with his fellow men, and he was respected by all who knew him. He was a model citizen in every respect. He died in March, 1874, and is buried in the cemetery near Wamsleysville, Ohio. His son, Lafayette Jones, the present Surveyor of Scioto County, is sketched in this work.
From "History of Adams County, Ohio from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time" - by Nelson W. Evans and Emmons B. Stivers - West Union, Ohio - Published by E. B. Stivers - 1900