Lou’s View – Dec. 11, 2014

Happy Birthday, Jerry Church!

by Lou Bernard

Often, it’s nice to time an article with an anniversary. Especially if the article will be published on the actual date. What with this year being the 175th anniversary of the county’s founding, I’ve gotten to do that a lot. And I’ve had a couple of interesting ones lately, because the birth and death dates of Jerry Church, town founder, are both on days I get published. The next time that will happen is in the year 2346. (NOTE TO EDITOR: You may want to check this fact, especially as I just made it up.)

If you’ve picked up the Record the day it comes out, you are reading this on Jerry Church’s birthday. I had to say something about Jerry, who was born on December 11, 1796. Today he would be turning 218.

As you know, unless you’ve been living in a cave in Glen Union for the last year, Jerry Church founded both Lock Haven and Clinton County. He lived here from 1833 to 1845, when he went on to the west, founding Carlisle, Iowa, where he died.

He died at the home of his daughter, Margaret, who has always been a bit of a mystery.

We don’t know too much about the circumstances of Margaret’s birth. We know that she was born on May 1, 1835, two years after Jerry founded Lock Haven. Her mother has been something of a subject of debate; many sources don’t agree on the identity of Margaret’s mother, or why she wasn’t a presence in Margaret’s life.

Some sources tell the story of Jerry having an affair with the daughter of a wealthy local family, who refused to take responsibility for the baby. They tell of Jerry traveling in shame out west, taking a baby with him. A 1930 letter from a descendant in Iowa mentions Jerry arriving at a local hotel out there with a baby daughter, mortified and homeless.

I may not say what I think of these stories in a family paper, but it rhymes with “jewel bit”. (My attorneys have instructed me not to be more emphatic than that.) You may have noticed that the times don’t work out—Jerry Church was living in Lock Haven until 1845, when Margaret was ten years old. He didn’t go out west with a baby. In fact, he didn’t take Margaret at all, initially—Census records show that she was in the care of a local family named Hanna until 1851, when Jerry decided it was safe.

Based on information from descendants, I’ve always felt that Margaret’s mother was Maria Mahan, the daughter of Alexander Mahan, who owned a local hotel at the corner of Bellefonte Avenue and Jones Street, or, as it was at that time, on a hill in the woods.

There have been other candidates proposed, but according to cemetery records, they all were either younger than Margaret, or died before she was born. And either way, that makes them unlikely to have been her mother.

Maria Mahan was born about 1817, and was in her late teens when Jerry Church came around to create Lock Haven. She would have been helping her father out at the hotel, where Jerry visited, according to at least one article. He used to have dinner there, and then ride back down the avenue to his home.

Maria died in November of 1835, when Margaret Church was only about six months old. This would explain why Margaret’s mother was never mentioned—She died when Margaret was very young.

There’s a moment in Jerry Church’s journal at about the right time when he gets sort of morbid—He talks about not knowing what comes in the next life, and says,”The journey of life is short, and I begin myself to think that my journey will be short.” It looks as if, for once in his life, Jerry was ready to settle down, and then his love died.

But all this is circumstantial. It proves nothing. If only I had a document that could prove it for sure….

Sort of like the one I turned up in our file at the library when I was looking for something to base this article on. A copy of the funeral record of Margaret Church lists her father as Jerry Church, and her mother as Maria Mahan.

So now we know. It’s pretty certain that Maria Mahan was the mother of Margaret Church.

Happy birthday, Jerry. To celebrate, I thought I’d solve another one of the mysteries you left for me.