Frank Meredith Jones

Engineering and settlement in New Mexico

Frank Meredith Jones appears in the family history as a professional whose employment carried him into New Mexico and whose marriage helped anchor him there. In interviews recorded at Watrous in February 1999, his grandson George Meredith “Dogie” Jones described him as a civil engineer who came west to survey the Santa Fe Railroad’s right-of-way. The account names the employer and the nature of the work, although it does not identify a particular survey party or assign him responsibility for an entire stretch of railroad.^[1]

Engineering employment also shaped the household’s geography. Dogie Jones said his father, Garnet Meredith Jones, was born at Fort Sumner because Frank was employed there at the time. He also identified the family home in Las Vegas as 1010 Douglas Avenue. These two places belong together in the account: a birth associated with a work posting and a more settled urban home. Treating either one as the family’s only New Mexico residence would obscure the movement described by the descendant.^[1]

Jones’s engineering career is therefore documented most clearly through work, residence, and family testimony rather than a surviving professional résumé. The museum abstract calls him an architect as well as a civil engineer when discussing the ranch house at Watrous. Those descriptions establish the occupations remembered by his family; they do not establish a university degree or professional qualification that the abstract does not mention.^[1]

Marriage into the Kronig family

Jones married Fanny, a daughter of William Kronig, the merchant and landowner whose businesses helped shape the settlement around Watrous. The marriage is not supported by oral history alone. A biography of William published in An Illustrated History of New Mexico in 1895 identifies his surviving daughter from his first marriage as Mrs. Frank M. Jones, then a resident of Las Vegas. The identification supplies a contemporary connection among the Kronig family, the married name Jones, and the town named in the later interview.^[2][1]

The 1895 biography describes William’s first wife as Raphaela Kincaid and dates their marriage to 1856. It states that she died in 1858, shortly after the birth of a second child, and that one of the two children survived. William subsequently married into the Watrous family. Modern memorial entries give different forms of the mother’s name and different dates. The older biography remains especially valuable because it identifies the adult daughter through her husband while her father was still alive.^[2][1]

William’s business history placed the marriage within a community already tied to long-distance transportation. His 1895 biography records the purchase of Barclay’s Fort in 1856 with approximately 700 acres of arable land. It also describes mining, irrigation, milling, and agricultural ventures. Frank’s railroad occupation and his father-in-law’s trading and farming interests were distinct activities, but both linked the household to the changing movement of goods through northeastern New Mexico.^[2][1]

The house at Watrous

The house occupied by Dogie Jones at the time of his interview was a tangible connection to his grandfather’s work. Dogie credited Frank Meredith Jones with its design. The museum abstract places William Kronig’s construction of this house in 1883. The earlier published biography independently states that William moved to his new location in 1883 and erected a stone residence, planted trees and flowering shrubs, and cultivated land that included an orchard.^[1][2]

This residence must be distinguished from William’s earlier Phoenix Ranch house. The 1895 biography describes that earlier property as an adobe residence beside an artificial lake and says that William eventually sold it at a substantial loss. The museum abstract also discusses the earlier house, giving inconsistent construction dates in different portions of the interview. The stone house associated with Frank’s design and the earlier adobe house belong to different stages of the family’s property history.^[1][2]

By the 1890s William’s household economy included extensive farming. The published biography gives approximately 550 cultivated acres at his later residence, while the oral history remembers stores, ranch buildings, irrigation works, and older transportation structures. Frank’s architectural connection is specific to the house attributed to him. It does not make him the designer of every building or water project associated with the wider Kronig properties.^[1][2]

Children and the Meredith name

Dogie Jones described his father, Garnet Meredith “Butch” Jones, born in 1888, as one of seven children. He remembered a family in which the children received education and entered several occupations, including teaching and engineering; one became an FBI agent. The interview abstract does not provide a complete named list. The total of seven is consequently more informative than the shorter set of children linked on any one modern memorial page.^[1]

Garnet’s career joined the town household to the ranching community. Although raised in town, he spent considerable time on the ranch and became a veterinarian. According to the same interview, he served as a military veterinarian in the First World War and later worked with livestock and rodeos. These details concern Frank’s son rather than Frank himself, but they explain how an engineering family’s New Mexico connections continued through a different profession.^[1]

The repeated middle name was another part of that inheritance. Dogie said that someone in the family had borne Meredith since 1601. His own name and those of Frank and Garnet show its use across the generations discussed in the interview. The much earlier date is preserved as a family tradition, not as a documented pedigree reaching back to the seventeenth century. The account is nevertheless direct evidence that the family attached significance to the name.^[1]

Later records and surviving memory

A contributor-maintained Find a Grave memorial reports Frank’s birth at Palmyra, Ohio, on 13 December 1849 and his death in Los Angeles on 9 November 1923. It identifies his burial at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego. These are memorial-record particulars rather than dates transcribed here from a birth or death certificate. The distinction matters because the museum interview concentrates on New Mexico work and family life, not a complete chronology.^[3][1]

Among the most personal surviving details is Dogie’s recollection that his grandfather Jones kept numerous pocket notebooks. The interview describes boxes of them in the family’s possession. Alongside the identifiable Las Vegas address, the ranch house, and the recorded recollections, those notebooks point to a life documented in small working records as well as public events. The public abstract establishes their remembered existence; it does not reproduce their contents or specify their present location.^[3][1]

Related articles

• Fanny Kroenig Jones — spouse
• Watrous and La Junta, New Mexico — associated place
• Railroad expansion into New Mexico — railroad work in family testimony

References

1. George Meredith “Dogie” Jones: oral-history abstract, interviews of February 8–9, 1999New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum
2. William Kronig, An Illustrated History of New Mexico (1895), transcriptionLewis Publishing Company; transcription by Genealogy Trails
3. Frank Meredith Jones (1849–1923), memorial 116939460Find a Grave, contributor-maintained memorial
4. Fanny Kroenig Jones (1856–1929), memorial 306081227Find a Grave, contributor-maintained memorial