Jeremiah N. Reynolds (or James Neilson Reynolds, also John N. Reynolds)

(Born: ca. 1799 - Died: August 25, 1858)

His mother was Elizabeth Nicholson. Jeremiah’s middle name may have been Nicholson, after his mother’s maiden name. His father appears to have died in 1805 or 1806, and his mother married Job Jefferis, as his third wife, about 1808. (The first child of this new union was born late in 1809.) Jeremiah was born in Cumberland County, PA, but moved with his family as a child to Clinton County, OH. He was living in New York when he died, but was travelling in Canada at the time, possibly for health reasons, and died at St. Catherine’s Springs. A brief obituary appears in the New York Evening Post of August 27, 1858. Another somewhat longer and more detailed obituary appears in the New York Evening Express for August 27, 1858 (p. 2, col. 8), where his name is given as James N. Reynold, and it is noted that “Mr. R. had long been a suffering invalid, and his early death has been looked for by himself and friends for several months past,” and that since the Spring “he has been gradually wasting away.”

He appears to have attended Ohio University, in Athens, OH, about 1820, although it is not clear that he graudated.

There seems to be a considerable amount of confusion over his real name, and it was apparently a matter of some intentional mystification during his lifetime. He is usually noted only by his last name and first and middle initials, as J. N. Reynolds. The name has usually been rendered as Jeremiah N. Reynolds, particularly in later scholarship, but an adverstisement in The Farmer’s Dictionary (New York: Harper & Brothers) of 1846 lists “Books on Travel Published by Harper & Brothers,” including “James N. Reynolds” as the author of The Voyage of the Frigate Potomac. (The same advertisement appears in a number of other books published about the same time.) Similarly, the Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal of June 1834, reprinting an article from the Boston, lists “James N. Reynolds” among the officers of the Frigate Potomac, as being the “commodore’s secretary” (6:309). In The Humboldt Current: A European Explorer and His American Disciples (Oxford University Press, 2007), Aaron Sachs asserts the name as James Neilson Reynolds, based on an honorary degree bestowed on Reynolds by Columbia University in 1835.