History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday reflecting on the history of the community.
MOUNT VERNON — Readers have helpfully chipped in with further information about the local connections of the
Dawson family, whose son, Joe Dawson, was the second-ever winner of the Indianapolis 500 motor race in 1912.
Tom Stream took a look in the 1909/1910 issue of French’s Directory for Mount Vernon and Knox County and found a Mary Dawson — widow of Joseph — who lived on Granville Road in Martinsburg.
While that Joseph is not the same as Joe the racer, it is very likely a close relative, as we shall see below.
Then I heard from my old friend Joe Huddleston, who was the sports editor at the Mount Vernon News when I worked there in the news mines nearly 20 years ago. Intrigued by my column, Joe did some searching and came up with an interesting website about the early history of auto racing: FirstSuperSpeedway.com, maintained by the racing historian Mark Dill.
In addition to offering much more in-depth information about Joe Dawson, Dill’s contributor Larry Snyder has traced that Joe’s father, Chase Francis Dawson, was born near Howard, in Knox County, July 15, 1864, which gives us the local connection that we were looking for.
After his father, Joseph Albert Dawson, died when Chase was 17, Chase moved to Indiana, where he married Clara Belle Crooke in 1887, and her maiden name became racer Joe’s middle name when he was born in 1889.
Joseph Albert Dawson was born in Pennsylvania in 1921, and came to Knox County, Ohio, in the early 1840s, where he met and married Mary Osborne. Mary was long-lived, and it turns out that she is the Mary from the 1909/1910 directory, as she lived until 1912, outliving her husband by over 30 years.
In all likelihood, Joe the racer was named after his grandfather, and the family’s return to Knox County during Joe’s youth was likely to visit with grandma Mary.
Joseph Albert Dawson worked as a farmer and a carpenter, and is buried in the Old Jelloway Cemetery, showing that this family had many connections in eastern Knox County.
Joseph Albert’s father was Dr. John Pinkerton Dawson, and he moved with his son’s family to Knox County. He is also buried in the Old Jelloway Cemetery. The deep roots of the family go back to Londonderry, in Northern Ireland.
Many thanks to Joe Huddleston and Tom Stream for gathering further proof that Joe Dawson had substantial connections to Knox County. And kudos to FirstSuperSpeedway.com for fleshing out Joe Dawson’s history even further.