OP-ED: What truly makes America incredible
I had a grandad Jacob and a granddad Jacobs. Okay, well, Jacob was one’s first name and Jacobs another’s last. It wasn’t the real last name. That was Iacoboni, but Americanized Iacoboni became Jacobs.
My Italian family tree took us back to a little, beautiful village in Italy in the region of Lazio, the province of Frosinone, called Alvito. It was mostly all volcanic soil with lots of stones. He said his dad owned one oxen, and he and his brothers spent all day picking up rocks so his father could plow the fields. Their families supplied vegetables to the duke who owned the land. Because of that sharecropper existence, my Italian grandfather left for America at 13.
Here is the other half of my immigrant story. On July 4, 1776, my multiple times removed grandfather, Jacob Beeson, got together with his brother Henry and combined their two pieces of land to create a town.
Because they were humble Quakers, they chose the word union, and the town became Uniontown. The idea was to create a place where people could live peacefully and prosper in their newfound land. William Penn granted them the land, but it really belonged to the Native Americans who lived there long before they did. So, there’s that side of the story, too.
The Beeson family origin’s traced back to Liverpool, England, and before that from France. Some of the earlier relatives were estate owners with titles, but because of religious persecution, Jacob and Henry’s father decided to move to Virginia in the 1600s. Later, his two sons headed to the new frontier and settled in the Appalachian Mountains.
My relative ran an inn, The Mount Vernon Inn, and he became friends with Gilbert du Motier, the French nobleman who fought in the Continental Army and was more widely known as General Lafayette. Our family had a set of General Lafayette’s silver spurs for decades. The spurs went to a museum. I can remember having dinner at that inn as a kid. The placemat said Grandad Jacob often returned from the well with arrows sticking in the wooden buckets. You see, there were some unhappy Native Americans nearby.
Another tale that was never officially documented but was part of family lore was about one of my cousins who the Indians kidnapped and took to their winter home in Florida. After 10 years, he had won over their trust, and they made him chief. As chief, he could do whatever he wanted. So, as the tale goes, he returned to Uniontown, but it did not take him too long to decide he liked it better in Florida, and he returned to the tribe.
One of our Beeson cousins owned the Long Branch Saloon that was in the long-running television series “Gunsmoke.” Other relatives founded the Beeson School of Divinity at Stamford University in Alabama, and still others were some of the original donors who started the San Diego Zoo. Besides state and federal members of Congress, we had a cousin who took credit for teaching Richard Nixon how to play the piano. Too bad she did not teach him about morality.
The entire Beeson story became reality for me several years ago when I was sitting in the chair at my dentist’s office. We started talking about our roots – not dental roots, but family roots – and I blurted out that my mother’s side of the family had founded Uniontown. At that very moment, his wife was walking past the treatment room and said, “Wait a minute. My family founded Uniontown.” After 30-plus years of dental care in that office, we discovered that we were cousins, distant at best, and her mom was related to one of my mom’s cousins.
When my mom and dad were married, it was a controversial wedding between the son of Italian immigrants and a daughter of ol’ time British big-shots. Truthfully, that’s what has made America so incredible, and that’s what we should remember.
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.