Jack: The Legacy of a Great Dad and His Family

By Eric Mounts

If you are wondering about the value of a father, this biography is the definitive answer. If you are convinced that adversity ruins lives and inhibits character development, you need this story. This life of integrity was forged in the struggle of our broken world. Jack was an ordinary man who lived a modest life of faithfulness that had an immodest effect upon those around him. Jacks lineage is from a storied family in Appalachia. His childhood included his fathers absence during World War IIthat was only a preamble to struggles that would follow. It took the grace of God entering the family to shape a foundation to weather the adversities that inevitably came. Jacks outstanding achievement in life was his family. His faith, work ethic, resolve, courage, and his conviction would come together to shape a life that mattered. Jacks was not a perfect life, but one given to simple discipline and old-school values. His impact will reverberate for generations in his family. This fathers mark challenges fathers to invest in family and leave the sweet savor of a life well-lived. Jacks story is worth repeating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512780222

Eric Mounts

Eric Mounts graduated from Cedarville College (BA) and Dallas Theological Seminary with a ThM. In the midst of thirty years of pastoral ministry in the Midwest, he finished his DMin degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He and his wife Andi have three grown and married children with one granddaughter. Eric’s life was indelibly marked by a remarkable relationship he shared with his father. Eric is pictured with his father in the Wallace-Mounts Cemetery in Majestic, Kentucky. They stand next to Jack’s great grandparents’ gravestones, Andrew Jackson I and Lou Vicy Mounts.

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Copyright © 2017 Eric Mounts.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-8023-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8024-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8022-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017904408

WestBow Press rev. date: 4/18/2017

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 Andrew Jackson I

Chapter 2 The Stagecoach Driver

Chapter 3 Mulberry Tree Beginnings

Chapter 4 The Omega Belling, Circa 1947

Chapter 5 Coxey’s Army

Chapter 6 An Enon Tiger

Chapter 7 Linda

Chapter 8 January 8, 1960

Chapter 9 Work—Eighteen, Mounts

Chapter 10 Athlete And Coach

Chapter 11 A Day That Will Live In Infamy

Chapter 12 Mad River-Green Local School Board, 1974–1982

Chapter 13 John Birch’s Pen

Chapter 14 Fandom

Chapter 15 Understanding Dad

Chapter 16 The ‘97

Chapter 17 Cancer—September 1988

Chapter 18 Generosity

Chapter 19 Bishop Jack Mounts, Jr.

Chapter 20 My Retirement Party Speech For Dad

Chapter 21 The Last Battle

Chapter 22 A Pending Morning Meeting

Appendix 1 A Chronology Of Jack Mounts, Jr.’S Life

Appendix 2 Jami Hackworth’s Poem For Dad’s Funeral, July 2011

Appendix 3 Critical Names

Genealogy

Picture Index

To Dad, with great affection. You joyfully provided for your children all that you never had and introduced them to the way to life.

The finest man I ever met, I raised.

—Andrew Jackson Mounts III, Dad’s dad

FOREWORD

For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything, nor have they any longer a reward, for their memory is forgotten.

—Ecclesiastes 9:5

One of the most defining expressions of the Lord’s goodness to me is the father he chose for me. He gave me a great mom, and I will say more about that later, but the impact and blessing of a faithful dad is really hard to measure, especially for a son. God met that need in Jack Mounts, Jr. But to me, he was always just Dad. Well, that and my best man when I got married, a fitting title for Dad.

Growing up in church, I had a go-to piece of special music that I sang on a couple of occasions as a boy. Father’s Day was my day to sing before the Lord, the church, and, of course, my dad. I sang at least twice, maybe three times. I would get up and nervously chime out, I’ve got a heavenly Father, who is up in glory, I’ve got a heavenly Savior, what a wonderful story, but on this earth I have my Daddy, he’s everything to me, he’s the head of this house according to God’s Word. Daddy, Daddy, thank God for Daddy, he’s the head of this house according to God’s Word. It was that special day’s hit for years. I was so proud to sing that song. That Daddy meant the world to me, and I wanted everyone to know it.

When I was five, my friend at church lost his dad to a brain tumor. I was rudely introduced to the hole that leaves or is filled by a present and faithful dad. Watching Greg, at five, I began to mourn the inevitable. I hated the thought that if the mortality tables ran their usual course, someday I would have to give up my own dad to heaven. So I determined to savor the moments and celebrate this gift. And that is what I have done. The memories are rich and full. I cannot quite get my arms around the breadth of their impact.

I want my children to understand their Pa. If these stories are not told their children will grow up without a sense of who went before them in our family. We will miss a moment without some sense of who the patriarch was. His name is Jack and he casts a long shadow. Out of a desire to preserve his memory and celebrate his influence for my children and theirs, I write this book.

I was not around for the first twenty-four years of my father’s life and was not closely attentive for the next five, but I have had a front row seat for the last forty-eight. I cannot spin a chronological biography, for there are too many unknown gaps and missing pieces of day-to-day life. But what I can do is to tell stories that are characteristic of him that frame a mosaic of his life and influence. My dad was not a formally educated man. That is a privilege that he gave his kids that he never had, a part of the legacy of his and Mom’s parenting. What he lacked in formal education, he made up for in wisdom and sense. These led to a longer reach on his great influence. I want to try to capture a measure of that wisdom and sense in this book. I have always needed it and benefited from it. My kids and their kids need it.

Dad would be the first to tell you he was not perfect. I get that too. But what makes him, him needs to be repeated in coming generations. His strengths stick out in a culture that has abandoned many of the traits he held dear in practice and experience. These iconic images are embedded in my memory—like him kneeling at his bedside to pray quietly and out loud before sleep—and need to be practiced in the years to come.

It is God who makes a good man. Ultimately, Dad’s strengths are an expression of God’s work of grace in his life through his faith in Jesus Christ. His sins are now eclipsed by that same grace.

In tribute to God’s gift to me in my dad, and in the hope that my children and theirs will have a clearer picture of where they came from and have insight into how to live skillfully based on the wisdom of the fathers, I write.

Eric Mounts

Father Day

June 17, 2012

My children, listen when your father corrects you. Pay attention and learn good judgment, for I am giving you good guidance. Don’t turn away from my instructions. For I, too, was once my father’s son, tenderly loved as my mother’s only child. My father taught me.

—Proverbs 4:1–3a New Living Translation

CHAPTER 1

Andrew Jackson I

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you … you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers.

—2 Peter 1:16; 1 Peter 1:18

I have never really understood the allure of fiction. Some people love it. I find nonfiction so much more interesting. I love that phrase of astonishment: You can’t make this stuff up. The stories of our family are fascinating. Some of them are true, but therein lies a problem. The oral history I received from my grandfather’s sister Fern seems to be inaccurate. But more relatives than Fern have carried her story in their memories.

According to Aunt Fern (in letter to me dated July 9, 1979), in the early nineteenth century, two immigrant brothers from Holland, following the Ohio River, came to a place near Huntington, West Virginia. In Kenova, West Virginia (back then it was Virginia), they split up and went their separate ways. One brother, it is said, made his way to Cincinnati. Family lore has him achieving some status, which led to a statue in tribute to him being put up after his death in a park in Cincinnati. According to Aunt Fern, Uncle Bronson (Grandpa Mounts and Fern’s brother) took Aunt Berthie (Dad’s grandfather’s sister-in-law) to see the statue at one point. I cannot find that statue, but I still love that story.

The other brother, David, is said to have married a Dutch girl named Peggy Cline. David and Peggy are said to have come down the Big Sandy River to Fort Gay, West Virginia. They went on up the Tug River and settled near Vulcan, West Virginia, in a place called Sands Siding, West Virginia. They were the first settlers in the area, and their first child was born there while David Mounts was crafting the logs for the cabin he built.

There is an admixture of truth in the tales and lore handed down in our family of Mounts and their origin. Here is what I have been able to figure out. The earliest known progenitor is a Virginian named John Lawrence Mounts. He was born in 1760, and his death date is unknown. Ancestery.com has him alive at ninety-two years old when his son David Cecil Mounts passed.

John Lawrence married in the early to mid-1780s, during the Revolutionary War. He married Elizabeth Raincrow. Obviously, she had an Anglicized Indian name. My sister Jami believes she was a Cherokee, although Iroquois and Shawnee were in western Virginia during that time as well. It is unknown how he secured his wife from the Indians. Elizabeth Raincrow did not live very long, which was not uncommon in those days. She died at twenty-one on October 24, 1788. Their son, David Cecil, was three years old when his mother died. Did she die in childbirth with her second child, which was so common in that day? John Lawrence would outlive his son and die after he was at least ninety-two years old in the early 1850s. He died around West Bethlehem in Washington County, which is close to Abingdon, Virginia.

David Cecil Mounts, son of the oldest patriarch of record, married Peggy Cline on April 5, 1809, in Montgomery County, Virginia. Apparently, Peggy was from Virginia. She lived a full life and died seventy-one years after they were married in 1880. In the early days of their marriage, David and Peggy lived along the Kanawha River in Kanawha City (close to Charleston, West Virginia). Their oldest son’s birth record, dated 1809, is from Kanawha City. Their second child, Nancy (1816–1862) was born in Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. (Today, Prestonsburg is the county seat).

At some point before 1816, David Cecil and Peggy Mounts moved to near Vulcan, West Virginia, to a place called Sands Siding. He was a bit of a pioneering settler. He was thirty-two years old. There was no structure to inhabit, so he took up residence in a huge, hollowed-out sycamore tree as he built his cabin. There is an extant picture showing David and Peggy in front of the tree. Mitchell, a fourth child, was born in what was known then as Logan County. Mitchell is my dad’s (Jack Mounts, Jr.) grandfather’s grandfather. Mitchell lived out his adult life around the Tug Fork River in Pike County, Kentucky. He is buried in the Wallace-Mounts Cemetery in Majestic near the Mounts’ bottoms (a local geographic reference point). It is an area that his dad settled, some fifty-nine miles from where John Lawrence fathered David Cecil Mounts. On today’s roads, there are ninety-two miles between Washington, Virginia, and Vulcan, West Virginia.

Mitchell was the fourth of six children given to David Cecil Mounts and Margaret Peggy Cline. Jane Mounts was born in Virginia in 1819, and Alexander Mounts was born in 1824 in Montgomery, Virginia, around where his grandfather John Lawrence Mounts was born. No two of the six children were born in the same place. Did logging take them to several communities? Did Margaret Peggy go back home to Virginia to have several of her children? With the transportation of that era, it would be much less likely that she was traveling freely for the convenience of having children. David Cecil Mounts was a bit of an adventurous rolling stone.

In contrast to the nomadic life of David Cecil Mounts, his son Mitchell stayed in one place and lived out his days. Mitchell Mounts was born in what was then Logan County, Virginia, in 1818. He died in 1879 on the other side of the Tug Fork River in Pike County, Kentucky. He is buried in the Wallace-Mounts Cemetery in Majestic, just a hundred yards from the Tug Fork River in what is now West Virginia.

Mitchell, like his father, married a Cline, Matilda Cline in early 1844 or late 1843. Did he marry his cousin or his second cousin? He could have. It would prove to be a prolific union that produced eleven children. Their oldest child was a boy, and he started a river of namesake that flows unto today.

Andrew Jackson Mounts was born the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1844. There is no hint from previous generations regarding the origin of his name. The first Andrew Jackson Mounts would live until 1917. In his lifetime, he would see two more Andrew Jacksons born: Dad’s grandfather (1886–1944) and Dad’s dad (1915–1995).

The name Andrew Jackson is a bit of mystery. Why Andrew Jackson? Were they named after our famed seventh president who served from 1829 to 1837? He was a democrat whose presidency represented the common man and a pitch away from the first six presidents who had their lineage in the elite class. Was it the last name of General Thomas Stonewall Jackson from the Civil War? That vital fact is now lost on this succession of Andrew Jacksons, which flowed down in the Mounts’ family tree.

David Charles was born in February of 1848. He would die in 1931 as the Great Depression was setting in. Michael Mounts leaves a paltry record of his life. Did he die as an infant? Matilda Mounts was born in 1850. John Mounts was born in 1852, and his sister (Sarah) came in May of 1854. Mitchell and Matilda had an Andrew, and they added Alexander in 1856 and Anderson in 1858. Tilly Mounts came in 1860 and Edith arrived between Tilly and Charlie (who came in 1864). Did Edith die as a child? There is virtually no record of her life. What a big family Mitchell raised in western Virginia. By the time his last child was born in 1864, his state had become West Virginia in a fracas over slavery. West Virginia became a free state.

Mitchell’s oldest son, Andrew Jackson (1844–1917), would follow his father’s cue and stay in the area. He lived out his days around the Vulcan, West Virginia and Majestic, Kentucky area. He married Lou Vicey Hunt. Her father was Thomas Hunt (d. 1884) who had married Clarissa Murphy (1815–1887). Andrew Jackson made his homes through the years in Peter Creek in Pike County (1880 census), Blackberry Creek in West Virginia, and Freeburn, Kentucky (1910). All of those neighborhoods were in the same vicinity, along the Tug Fork