Elmton has nothing for us to see today but a plain church of the 18th century and a churchyard in which is buried an Elmton man who has curiously written his name into books all over the world, though here he is without a stone to mark the place.
Here he was born in 1707, here they laid him in 1772, Jedediah Buxton, son of the village school-master.
There were many odd circumstances in his phenomenal career, but almost equalling his astonishing faculty for figures was the strangeness of the fact that Jedediah, although grandson of the vicar and son of the schoolmaster, never could learn to read or write. He passed his life as a labourer in the fields, dreaming in arithmetic. The theory of the men who studied him was that, having a genius for mathematics, he unconsciously developed it to the entire exclusion of other mental attributes. Working away in the open, he was constantly creating and solving problems with which normal mathematicians found it difficult to grapple.
However limited his knowledge, his power of concentration on his favourite subject was baffling. He chatted briskly while working out such a problem as this:
'In a body whose three sides measure 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards and 54,965 yards, how many cubic eighths-of-an-inch are there?'
As he walked over a field he could estimate its area to an inch with the accuracy of a surveyor. One of his rapid feats was his calculation of the product of a farthing doubled 139 times. When mathematicians had proved his answer correct, Jedediah calmly multiplied his answer by itself. He could break off a calculation at any point and resume it in a week.
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