Addison

JONES, Asa Stowell

Vermont Historical Magazine, No. XI, October 1867, p 102
(extracted from a section on the history of Shoreham, Addison County, Vermont)

Asa Stowell JONES, was born in 1828 in Shoreham [Addison County, Vermont]; 
graduated at Middlebury College in 1849; fifteen months principal of Newton 
Academy; edited the "Whitehall Chronicle" on year; in 1853 established 
himself as a lawyer in St. Louis [City of St. Louis], Missouri, where he has 
since taken an active part in politics. We give a brief extraction from a 
letter to his mother as a specimen of his offhand letter writing: [no date 
is given for this extract] "I heard of the death of sister Emma, in the midst 
of an exciting political campaign. That news transported me, all absorbed in 
the heated excitements of a political election in a great city, as I was, to 
the quiet town, the green common, and the silent yard where now lies, in 
peaceful slumber, my sister Emma. My mother, Emma is one of the jewels of 
memory, and I sometimes think that it is better, happier, more to be desired, 
to die and leave this world ere soil or taint has come upon the heart; before 
hopeful youth learns by bitter experiences that life, as we meet in daily 
contact with humanity, is hollow, treacherous, and deceitful. I could but 
mark the change in myself, from the time when engaged in schoolboy sports in 
that same town, on the same common, until every nook and corner, every stone, 
had imaged itself ineffaceably upon memory. Then how little did I imagine 
what was before me in the future, or under what circumstances the problem of 
my life's destiny should be wrought."

Submitted by Cathy Kubly