MC 223

1 box (0.33 cu.ft.)

About the Jones Family

Levi Jones was a farmer, businessman, innkeeper, and prominent mason of Milton, N.H. He was born in 1771 and died in 1847. He married Sally Worcester Wallingford (1799-1863), marriage date unknown, and they had one child, Charles, born in 1834. Charles married Betsy Varney (1836-1878) in 1856 and died in 1873. They bore three children, Fred P. (born about 1860), Nellie V. (born about 1862), and Charles Dana (b.1863; d.1908). Charles married Pauline Hart (b. 1966) and the couple bore five children – Katherine Mary (b. 1887), Russell Hart (b. 1893), Levi Dana (b. 1891), Hanson Varney (b. 1899), and Dorothy (b. abt. 1900). Fred married Emma Jane Cowell and had at least two children, the second of whom was Robert Edmond (b. 1887; d. 1958).

The Jones Farm now forms part of the New Hampshire Farm Museum on Plummer’s Ridge in Milton, N.H. and was gifted to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (SPNHF). (The adjoining farmhouse was obtained from the Plummer family – originally spelled Plumer – in 1993). The farm and its connected buildings extend 275 feet and date from the 1770s to the early 1900s. Each part of the connected farm structure tells a different story about rural life and work in the past. A tour of the Jones farmhouse allows the visitor to walk through time from Joseph Plumer’s Revolutionary War Era cape to Levi Jones’s early 19th-century tavern into the Victorian parlor and dining room and ending in the early 20th-century farm kitchen. Housed within the three-story, 104-foot Great Barn is one of New Hampshire’s greatest treasures: a collection of farm tools, implements, and machinery that was used to clear land, plant fields, harvest crops, construct buildings, and maintain community roads as well as extensive collection of milk bottles from the dairies that once proliferated throughout the New Hampshire countryside.

A companion parcel, 322 acres in size, located on Piggott Road in Milton, was gifted to the University of New Hampshire by the Jones family. In the past, it was used extensively by forestry classes for management exercises. The variation in vegetative makeup and terrain made it ideal for educational study and for wildlife habitat management. (A family of northern goshawks has been sighted on this property and it has been identified as a potential nesting site.) The extensive frontage on the Jones river creates interesting potential sites for research and undergraduate class visitation. This lot is periodically harvested as part of UNH’s sustainable timber harvesting program. The last commercial harvest performed on this property was in 1987. The property is multi-use, so is open to the public for most forms of non-motorized recreation including hunting, fishing and all forms of pedestrian traffic.

About the Jones Family Papers

The Jones family papers include account books kept by Levi Jones that provide a picture of the family farm operation, a series of deeds, land records, and receipts, two wills (those of Joseph Plumer, a neighbor, and Betsy G. Varney), as well as a speech delivered in 1834 by Levi on the subject of temperance. One incidental item is the transference to Elizabeth Jones in 1964 of the royalties to be earned by the work of set designer Robert Edmond Jones, one of the most influential figures in 20th‐century American theatre. He was the son of Fred P. and Emma (Cowell) Jones of Plummer’s Ridge, Milton and the great-grandson of Levi Jones.

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