Howard Jones papers

Howard Edward Jones was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 24, 1853, the son of Dr. Nelson E. Jones (1821-1901) and Virginia Smith Jones (1826-1906). Raised in Circleville, Ohio, he received two degrees from Hobart College in Geneva, New York (BA 1875, MA 1878), where he had helped to organize the college's natural history collections. In 1876 Jones received an MD degree from Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati, followed by studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons (now Columbia University) in New York City. He married Mary MacMullin in 1882, and practiced medicine in Circleville from the late 1870s until his death there on December 12, 1945. Outside his chosen profession, Jones was a noted naturalist and local historian who spoke and published about regional history, particularly focusing on American Indians, and founded the Ohio History Day Association with his wife Mary in 1926. Jones wrote , a history of Circleville, and an historical novel, The Tragedy of La Belle Riviere, as well as a number of articles on birds, medicine, medical history, and other topics. As a child, Jones had learned from his mother that her brother, Hamilton L. Smith, was the first daguerreotypist in Ohio; in his research he found instead that Smith had been the first American to patent the process of making photographs on japanned metal surfaces, later known as tintypes, in 1856. Also civic-minded, Jones was the president of the Circleville Light and Power Company, which he organized in 1891 to bring electric lights to Circleville's streets and merchants.

In 1878 Howard Jones's sister Genevieve (1847-1879) and her friend Eliza Jane Shulze began a project to illustrate the nests and eggs of local birds in the fashion of John James Audubon's work Birds of America. Howard Jones agreed to collect the required specimens and to write the accompanying texts, and the two women, both amateur artists, drew images of the specimens directly on lithographic stones and hand-colored the resulting prints. Their limited-edition publication, titled Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, was issued to subscribers in twenty-three parts between 1879 and 1886, with the printing done in Cincinnati by the Krebs Lithographing Co. (plates) and Robert Clarke & Co. (texts); production costs were underwritten by Nelson Jones. When Genevieve Jones died from typhoid fever one month after Part I was issued, her mother Virginia, also an untrained artist, stepped in to complete the illustrations, hiring three young women, including Josephine Klippart (1848-1936), to assist with coloring the plates. The publication was heralded by contemporary ornithologists for its fidelity to nature, with favorable comparisons made to Audubon's work.