John Wilkinson (American colonist)

John Wilkinson (November 13, 1758 – 1802) was born in Rhode Island, United States. He was a direct descendant of Lawrence Wilkinson who fled the oppression of Oliver Cromwell in 1652 and settled in America and the son of Roger Wilkinson, an early colonist, who settled in Rhode Island where Roger Williams promoted the concept of freedom of religion.

John Wilkinson settled in Troy, New York and seventeen years later moved his family to Skaneateles, New York.

His son, John Wilkinson Jr. was the first Postmaster of Syracuse, New York and gave the city its name. Great-grandson, John Wilkinson invented the air-cooled engine and helped found the Franklin Automobile Company.

Biography
He was one of eight children. In 1776, at age 17, John Wilkinson enlisted in the Continental Army and fought in the American Revolutionary War. He was captured by British forces and subjected to "nine brutal months on a prison ship in New York Harbor". The experience nearly killed him. After he was freed in a prisoner exchange, he returned home to recuperate.

Personal
In 1782, he married Elizabeth "Betsey" Tower, age 18, born about 1764. Together, the couple settled in Troy, New York where they had four children:
 * Son – John Wilkinson Jr. (1798–1862) – Postmaster of community known as Bogardus Corners, Cossit's Corners and Salina. "As a young person, he took inspiration from a poem about an ancient city, and proposed that the new village community take the name of that place. He named it Syracuse."
 * Great-grandson, John Wilkinson (1868-1851) - Graduate of Cornell University in 1889 and chief engineer at H. H. Franklin Manufacturing Company where he invented the air-cooled engine used in the Franklin (automobile).

Skaneateles
By 1799, seventeen years after they married, Wilkinson left Troy, New York in the middle of winter leading a cow. His wife, children and household goods were aboard a sledge (wagon) drawn by a yoke of oxen. The entourage hiked west 180 miles along the corridor that today roughly corresponds to Route 20. Wife, Elizabeth, was nursing five-month-old, John Wilkinson Jr. The family settled about a mile from Skaneateles Lake in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York and built a farm not long after.

Unitarianism
Unitarianism was the religion of choice for generations of the Wilkinson's. His son, John Wilkinson Jr. was on the committee that welcomed Reverend Samuel Joseph May, the famous minister and abolitionist to Syracuse in 1843. The pastor's daughter, Charlotte May, later married John Wilkinson Jr.'s son, Alfred Wilkinson.

Death
A few years after the family arrived in Skaneateles, New York, about 1802, Wilkinson fell from the roof of a barn and died at age 43. Widow, Elizabeth Wilkinson stayed at the farm and ran the place with the help of her sons.

Burial
The couple was buried in a small family cemetery, along what later became Route 20. He was buried there in 1802, and his wife, Elizabeth, who lived into her 60s, was buried there in the late 1820s or early 1830s.

Decades later, about 1900, family members sold the farm. They moved the remains of 15 kin from the family burying ground to Lake View Cemetery in the village of Skaneateles. A headstone was erected with all the family names, including John and Elizabeth Wilkinson.

In 1971, a contractor began to excavate the old Wilkinson place for a new office building. Two partial skeletons, of a white man and woman, "were bulldozed out of a swatch of gravely soil." At the time, no one could figure out whose bones they were. Marked as "John and Mary Doe", the bones were placed in a box at the morgue. Later an amateur historian who worked for the village of Skaneateles believed that the skeletons were the Wilkinson's. The county medical examiner agreed and the bones were returned to the family in 1991 after spending 20 years in a cardboard box on a shelf at the Onondaga County medical examiner's office in Syracuse. The family had heard about the bones but believed they were servants. It wasn't until the historian's record search of veterans located in the Skaneateles Lakeview Cemetery in 1991, that the bones were identified.

The graves of both husband and wife were moved in 1991 to Skaneateles Lakeview Cemetery, and a funeral for them was held with military escort and a rifle salute on Memorial Day (May 27).