ABSTRACT
According to the Randolph County historian, John A. Commons became "widely known and universally esteemed". This contemporary account of John A. is more flattering than that of his son, John R. Commons, who complained that the old man was writing poetry when he should have been attending to business. Most of John A'.s poems were "for the drawer" as poets say, but John R. kept one that his father had sent to Clarissa Rogers, a school teacher in Richmond, Indiana. In 1860, John A. Commons married Clarissa Rogers. She was the great-great granddaughter of the Reverend John Rogers, the first Congregationalist Minister of Boxford, Massachusetts. In 1878 John A. moved his family away from Union City, the railroad town, to Winchester, closer to the center of Randolph County, and he traded the Union City Times for the Winchester Herald.
