GettyOn June 23, 2020, I sent an email to Marianne B. Leese, the senior historian of the Historical Society of Rockland County.I had what I hoped was an easy question to answer.Who the hell was Jackie Jones?Two days earlier, on the longest day of the year, I had ridden a bicycle over the newly opened bike path on Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge from my home in southern Westchester County.After passing through Nyack and up to Haverstraw, I'd climbed up to Harriman State Park and rode nearly all the way to the top of a local peak. On foot, I'd climbed up to the top of a creaking old fire tower at the summit.The view from on top of Jackie Jones Mountain was spectacular. Courtesy Tony Ortega The year before, I'd noticed that an Arkansas man named Doug Melton, whose hobby is ascending county summits, had done an analysis of LIDAR data (laser ranging) and determined that for years the wrong peak had been designated the highest point in Rockland County.With his analysis, Melton determined that Rockhouse Mountain was not 1,283 feet high, but only 1,271.95 feet, making it 5.55 feet lower than nearby Jackie Jones Mountain, at 1,277.5 feet.A website called Peakbagger.com, a major arbiter for the country's “high pointers,” made the change to its database. As far as Peakbagger was concerned, Jackie Jones Mountain was now supreme.I'd recently begun my own pursuit of bagging county high points, but with a twist: riding there on a bicycle. I've ascended 20 of them, in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, including all five New York City boroughs in a single day's ride.But none of them provided such a breathtaking vista as Jackie Jones Mountain. And as I left to ride down the mountain and go the long way home over Bear Mountain Bridge, I couldn't get one thought out of my mind.Who was the mountain named after?Initially, Ms. Leese said she couldn't find anything in a book of history about the park, and when she checked with a former park employee who knew the area well, "He confirmed for me that no one knows who Jackie Jones was or how the mountain came to bear the name Jackie Jones."I turned to a New York state historian who was similarly stumped, but he was kind enough to check with his federal counterpart who pointed out that there was another peak a few miles away named Tom Jones Mountain. Perhaps there was a Jones family among local early settlers, he suggested.On a website about the history of the nearby town of Stony Point, I found that a Jones family had been particularly prominent in the area. But nothing about a Jackie.Several weeks later, Marianne Leese sent another message. She managed to find a 1992 document put out by the Palisades Interstate Park Commission that said the mountain had probably been named for a local resident, John R. Jones or his son John Jr., who had lived on the north side of the mountain in Sandyfield, a tiny hamlet that had been wiped out when a dam was built to create nearby Lake Welch in the 1940s.Is Olana 19th Century America’s Greatest Work of Visual Art?Now that I had a possible name, I was able to find more information about John R. Jones of Sandyfield.He had been born in 1817 in Haverstraw or Stony Point, and had married Highlyann Babcock. When John was about 24 and Highlyann was about 20 they began having children. Adelia, Margaret, and William all grew into adulthood.Their next child, Hiram, named after Highlyann's younger brother, was born in 1849 but died only a few years later, in 1853. Then they had Mary, John Jr., Harriet, Martha, and finally Sarah in 1862. Nine children over 21 years, and with nineteenth-century health care. They seemed fortunate to have lost only one of the nine while in childhood.According to the 1992 document, cultivating the soil in Sandyfield was a tough prospect, subsistence farming that would have required other work to make life sustainable. At some point the Jones men had given it up and had taken up stone masonry. They became known locally for harvesting fieldstones that were used in construction, and examples of their work can still be found throughout the area.Highlyann died in 1886, and John ten years later, in 1896.The first instance I could find in local newspapers of the name "Jackie Jones Mountain" occurred 31 years later, in 1927. But there was nothing in the 1992 article that explained how John R. Jones of Sandyfield had come to have the mountain named after him, or whether there was any evidence that he was known by that name.And I soon found out I wasn't the only person who had been looking for him.In 2010, Alexandra Wren, then 19, went on a hike in Harriman State Park in search of her family's past. Following a description in a newly published park guide, she hiked on a path called Beech Trail until she found a trailside cemetery.Twenty years before, an eagle scout named Leroy Babcock Jr. had refurbished the forgotten little burial ground, repairing headstones and reinforcing them with metal frames. A small plaque bore witness to Leroy's work.The graves were of John R. Jones, his wife Highlyann, and their 3-year-old son Hiram. Nearby were the headstones of two Civil War soldiers and members of the New York 6th Heavy Artillery, known as the “Anthony Wayne Guard” after a local Revolutionary War hero: John Strickland, a father of eight who had died of typhoid fever in 1863 at 45, and his brother-in-law Timothy Youmans, who died at 35 on April 7, 1865, just two days before the end of the war. Timothy, I would learn, was Highlyann’s second cousin.When she spotted the stones, Alexandra used her mobile phone to call her father, Gordon, who was busy working as Rockland County's Director of Fire and Emergency Services. "Gordon Wren, standing where he did as a 20-year-old taking admission money to the fundraiser at Burgess Meredith's estate in 1966." Courtesy Tony Ortega "I hope this is important," he told her."It is," she said, and told him what she was looking at, the graves of John and Highlyann Jones.He told her she was looking at her great-great-great-great-grandparents.He told that story to the Genealogical Society of Rockland County in 2013, and it was reported in the Rockland County Times, which turned up on a search.Gordon retired in 2018, but I found an email address for Alexandra, who is now 30 and runs a photography business. I sent her an email explaining my interest in her family history. Gordon then called me, and confirmed that John R. Jones, the Sandyfield farmer, was his great-great-great-grandfather. He believed that Jones was the Jackie Jones the mountain had been named after, although he had no documentation of it.Gordon has lived in the area his entire life, and could still remember his older relatives, in the 1950s, speaking with a local mountain dialect. Back then, when the first bridge across the Tappan Zee was just being built, the differences between the two places, small Rockland County with its mountains and New York City to the south, were much more pronounced, and things that were unique about the area had not yet been lost.Gordon worked in firefighting his entire career and became Rockland County's chief fire instructor in 1977. He was named director of the county's emergency services in 1995 and served in that role until his retirement.I could hardly have found someone more rooted to Rockland County or more familiar with its every nook and cranny. Gordon was involved in local historical societies, and he led hikes through the backwoods.He was anxious to share his own search for local history, and we bonded quickly over several phone calls discussing the mountain and his family.A couple of weeks after I first made contact with him, I emailed Gordon with some news I'm sure neither one of us expected.While continuing to search for some actual documentation providing a link between his great-great-great-grandfather and Jackie Jones Mountain, I had stumbled on a newspaper article in the January 23, 1896 issue of the Rockland County Messenger.It was about John R. Jones a