Jones County has a story most of its own residents have never fully heard, and Charlie Jones, president of the Jones County Historical Society and Filling Station board member, is on a mission to change that. In this episode, Charlie sits down with Mary Ann LeRay to trace the county's origins from the ground up, starting with the difficult coastline that slowed European settlement, the Tuscarora people who called this land home long before colonizers arrived, and the wave of German and Swiss Protestant immigrants who sailed for the New World in 1710 and ended up, after extraordinary hardship, becoming the foundation of what is now Jones County.
The story Charlie tells is not a tidy one. Those early settlers faced brutal winters, drought, yellow fever, the Tuscarora War, and the loss of their land in the dead of winter when a creditor called in the mortgage and forced them upriver with little more than what they could carry. Out of that displacement came New Germany, the assimilation of those families into the English-speaking population, and eventually the petition that created Jones County in 1779. Many familiar local surnames, including Ipock, Andrews, and Koonce, trace directly back to those German and Swiss roots.
Charlie also takes a close look at Wiley Jones, the man the county is named for, an aristocratic Democrat, one of the largest slaveholders in North Carolina, and the political figure who arguably made the Bill of Rights possible. His insistence that the Constitution could not be ratified without one shaped the founding documents that govern the country today, even as he preferred to work quietly behind the scenes and was absent on the day of the actual vote.
The conversation closes with Charlie sharing why local history matters to him personally, what the Jones County Historical Society is doing to preserve and share it, and how residents can engage with that history right now through the architectural survey book, the Revolutionary War placards on the courthouse lawn, and the Charters of Freedom display at the Civic Center. With Jones County's own 250th anniversary approaching in 2029, there has never been a better time to know where this place came from.