Ancestors

Jasper Newton Risenhoover

Jasper Newton Risenhoover was born in November near Patterson in Wayne County, Missouri, in the eastern Ozarks, the son of John G. Risenhoover, a Tennessee man who had come into the territory in 1822, and Frances, who was born in South Carolina. The year is the one thing about him nobody could agree on. His grave marker says 1827, he told a reporter 1829, and the census takers of 1850 and 1880 and the clerk who enrolled him in the Confederate army in 1862 all wrote down ages that put his birth about 1838 to 1840. He told the story of his family's coming himself, as an old man: his father settled first on the Current River at old Van Buren, a few miles up the river from the present town and on the opposite bank, stayed a short time, and then moved to Wayne County. Jasper remembered a boyhood country where bear, elk and deer were plentiful, where herds of buffalo could still be found in Butler County next door, and where the men of the neighbourhood would make up hunting parties.

The census of 1850 found him in his father's house in Wayne County with six brothers and sisters, William, Margaret, John, Francis, Athaly and James, and a family of Howards living with them. He was entered as twelve. Before the war he married Rachel, a Tennessee girl whose children gave her surname as Dunigan, and the young couple went south across the line into the hill counties of northern Arkansas. Their first child, Sarah Ann, was born on 15 January 1861 in Izard County, Arkansas, by her own death certificate.

On 4 March 1862, in Fulton County, Arkansas, Jasper enlisted as a private in Company C of the Fourth Missouri Infantry, a Confederate regiment raised that spring among Missouri men in northern Arkansas, under Captain Hays. The clerk wrote his age as twenty-two and his home as Marion County, Arkansas. The regiment marched east into Mississippi with the army of Sterling Price, the former governor of Missouri who led the state's Confederate troops. Jasper's service card lists the fights he was in: South Fork, Farmington, Iuka, Corinth, Hatchie Bridge, Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Baker's Creek, Big Black and Vicksburg. Iuka and Corinth were Price's battles in northern Mississippi in September and October 1862, and Hatchie Bridge was the fighting retreat from Corinth. About 1 November 1862 the Fourth was merged with the First Missouri as the 1st and 4th Consolidated Infantry, and in the spring of 1863 it fought at Port Gibson, at Baker's Creek, which the Union called Champion Hill, and at the Big Black River bridge, before falling back inside the works at Vicksburg.

Vicksburg was besieged for six weeks and surrendered on 4 July 1863. Jasper was among the garrison taken prisoner that day. Two days later, on 6 July, he was paroled: released on his promise not to fight again until exchanged. The regiment's muster roll for November and December 1863 carries him as having deserted in July, after the surrender. Many of the Missouri men paroled at Vicksburg went home rather than back into the ranks, and the roll says no more.

After the war the family lived in Ozark County, Missouri, where Mary Jane was born about 1861 by her death certificate and Nancy Viola on 7 June 1878 by hers, and from about 1873 in Oregon County, on the Arkansas line, where Sena Savanna was born on 17 February 1872 and where he spent the rest of his long life. The census of June 1880 found him farming in Oak Grove Township with Rachel and ten children, from Sarah Anna, eighteen, to Viola, one, with Washington, five, among the younger ones. In 1900 he and Rachel were in Goebel Township with their son John and his wife, and in 1910 the old couple were living with their son Jap in Johnson Township. Rachel died in November 1918.

He went on. In February 1922 the Alton newspaper sent a reporter to Uncle Jap Risenhoover, then making his home with his son-in-law Ed Johnson in the Nebo district five miles southeast of town, and found a man who would not be taken for sixty, who did not work much but believed he could plow all day in smooth land, and who loved to talk of the good old days. The census of 1930 entered him at a hundred and two in the household of his daughter Nancy Johnson in Piney Township.

He died suddenly on 7 June 1935 at the home of his son William Henry Risenhoover in Lawrence County, Arkansas, at a hundred and seven by the family's count, known across the region as the oldest man in the Ozarks. By the age he gave the army in 1862 he was about ninety-five. The death notice said nine sons and daughters survived him, and two hundred and three grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His son John Newton died the same day. He was buried at Duty Cemetery, Lesterville, in Randolph County, Arkansas, where William Henry and John Newton also lie, under a bronze government marker that names his company and his army: Co C, Price's Mo Regt, Confederate States Army.

If Jasper Newton Risenhoover is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Jasper Newton Risenhoover (d. 1935)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jasper-newton-risenhoover-1935-07bd7c.