Jeanne Pritchard reflects on her family’s historic ties to Medina

A Revolutionary War veteran walks into a bar. “Has the judge arrived yet?” he asks.

“Yes, he has.”

“I hear he’s pretty smart.”

“Smart enough.”

“But I hear he drinks.”

No one from that day in 1818 recalled how the judge replied to the comment about his sobriety, but the anecdote, which appears in the 1861 "Pioneer History of Medina," caused great hilarity among the pioneers in what soon became the village of Medina.

The Revolutionary War veteran was Capt. Hermon Munson, who at age 88 traveled by oxcart from New Haven, Connecticut, to Medina County to claim land granted to him by the government for his military service. The war had ended 35 years earlier, but his entire family, including daughter Anna and her husband, Joseph Pritchard, were moving west, and Munson decided to join them.

The Hermon Munson anecdote still produces a smile two centuries later, this time from Jeanne Pritchard, a retired Medina High School teacher, second-term school board member and his direct descendant. She mentions equally colorful characters in her family tree, including the colonel whose regiment captured Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, as well as a great-uncle who participated in one of Ohio’s most sensational trials of the 1920s. She is also related to Medina’s Root family through a distant cousin, Rebecca Pritchard Root, grandmother of A.I. Root.

As Jeanne shares family history, she may be sitting in the same spot where the encounter between Munson and the judge took place. Today it is Cool Beans, a coffee shop on the northwest corner of Public Square. Two hundred years ago, it was a two-story log cabin with a bar on the first floor and a courthouse on the second.

Jeanne Pritchard grew up on the family farm, now the site of Medina Skateland on Pearl Road. She attended Garfield School and decided early what she was going to do.

“I always wanted to be a teacher,” she said. “And I would never think of living any place but Medina. I love this town and all its old traditions.”

She graduated from Ohio State in 1974 with a degree in physical education and health and began working in the Medina schools. It was a pivotal time, as Title IX, the Education Amendment prohibiting discrimination based on gender in education programs and activities, had passed two years earlier. Girls basketball, which had been played only sporadically in the 1950s and 1960s at Medina High School, expanded significantly, followed by volleyball, tennis, track and gymnastics.

“I was the volleyball coach for seven years,” Pritchard said, noting her team won the first conference championship in school history.

She started the first girls golf team at Medina in 1997 and guided it for five years, including two trips to state competitions in Columbus.

She later coached the boys golf team. During her 11-year tenure, the team advanced to the state tournament seven times. In 2012, The Plain Dealer named her boys golf coach of the year as her team finished fifth in the state.

Among her ancestors was cousin Col. Benjamin Dudley Pritchard. As the Civil War ended, Pritchard’s regiment pursued Jefferson Davis’ fleeing party. After surrounding the campsite, an officer noticed two heavily wrapped women leaving a tent. The women were stopped and asked to remove their cloaks and shawls. One of those “women” was Davis.

Col. Pritchard was elevated to brigadier general and received a $3,000 share of the bounty President Andrew Johnson offered for Davis’ capture.

Another ancestor, her great-uncle Joseph Howell Pritchard, was a Cleveland attorney who defended Martha Wise of Hardscrabble, Ohio, accused of poisoning 17 family members, three of whom died.

Wise, described as an abused and likely mentally ill farmwife, developed a fascination with attending funerals and purchased arsenic, which she placed in coffee pots and water buckets used by her family.

Joseph Pritchard successfully argued for life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. The case remains the subject of numerous books, podcasts and television crime shows.

As Independence Day approaches, Jeanne Pritchard plans to visit the graves of Hermon and Anna Munson at Medina’s Old Town Cemetery — the ancestors who began it all.