News

George A. Jones, keeper of history, dies at age 95

Dr. George A. Jones celebrates his 95th birthday last August with friends at Pop's Diner. [PHOTO COURTESY OF JEFF MILLER]

By Bill Moss, Published: February 13, 2016

George Alexander Jones, a minister, teacher, lifelong Republican, civic leader and keeper of the historic flame for Henderson County, died on Friday night at his home in Hendersonville. He was 95.

A man with a common name and uncommon intelligence, discipline and spirit, Jones died suddenly and without prolonged suffering at 10:30 p.m. — five years to the day after he lost his beloved wife of 66 years, Evelyn Masden Jones.
“They had been watching a family video. I talked to him,” said his daughter, Martha Denka. “He was in a good mood. Everything was good.”
His son, Uel, was visiting from California, and Jones had had a good week and a good day. He had enjoyed breakfast on Tuesday morning at Pop’s Diner, where he held court and bantered with his usual tablemates. He was not feeling ill. His son had just said good night and had turned to go to bed when he heard a thud.
“He wanted to die at home and he did,” Denka said. “I just prayed that he wouldn’t die alone and my prayer was answered. He’d been asking when it was that mother died. He’s been letting go the last few weeks.”

Tragedy at a young age

Jones was born in Saluda on Aug. 2, 1920, to Uel and Ida Constant Jones. He traced his family’s roots in Polk County for 200 years.
Young George suffered painful personal losses twice before age 20.
On Mothers Day of 1934, his older brother, Uel Kirk Jones, left church and got in his car to visit his mother.
“The car flipped over and killed him,” Jones said in a documentary on his life made by Patricia Bradley of Flat Rock. “He was dead at the scene. It was the first death in our family. It really shook everybody up.”
Tragically, it would not be the last. Two years later, in the summer of 1936, Jones's sister drowned while swimming in a river with friends. “For some reason she went down and didn’t come up,” Jones said. “It gave me experiences of life early.”
Jones’s friend, Leon Morgan, the owner of the historic M.A. Pace General Store in Saluda, said the deaths of his siblings so young likely did shape Jones’s path in life.
“It probably made him more alert about life and how precious life is and how valuable his friends and his kin were,” Morgan said.

After graduating from Saluda High School, he attended Lees McRae Junior College and then finished college at Lenoir-Rhyne University. He earned a master’s degree in theology and a doctorate in history from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
An ordained Baptist minister, he served in the Army chaplaincy in World War II. Sixty-six years later, Jones, as one of the last surviving chaplains from the war, attended the dedication of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps Memorial at Fort Jackson, S.C.
“I knew some of the men on that wall,” he told a reporter for the Columbia State newspaper. “We did what we needed to do at that juncture of history.”
In 1944, he married Evelyn Masden, a native of Shepherdsville, Ky. She was a schoolteacher and a good match for George’s caring for his fellow man and his determination to right wrongs.
“You know the Bible says something about being equally yoked, and she and Dr. Jones were beautifully wedded — they just complemented each other so perfectly,” Tom Orr, a retired schoolteacher, history writer and friend of the couple, told the Hendersonville Times-News when Mrs. Jones died. “She was a smart woman, and she was an excellent speaker. She could speak extremely well.”

Led fight to save Historic Courthouse

Jones pastored churches in Shepherdsville and Lawrenceburg, Ky., and in Beaufort, S.C., where he was instrumental in leading the peaceful desegregation of public schools. In 1970 he became executive director of the Northern Kentucky Baptist Association.

When they retired, George and Evelyn moved home to Hendersonville, where he led efforts to preserve local history while continuing to accept interim pastorships and leading mission trips to China, Russia and Wales.
Plunging into a multitude of projects revolving around history and civic affairs, Jones stayed as busy in retirement as he had been in his working life — and may have become even more influential.
Because of George Alexander Jones, the community has a historical society and a Main Street building to house it.
Because of George Jones, the town has a Historic Courthouse that stands both as a symbol of the town’s civic life and a functioning headquarters of county government.
Because of George Jones, the town has a museum in that Historic Courthouse.
Because of George Jones, the town for many years had an elder statesman to open its biggest festival with a greeting to all, a salute to apple farming, a nugget of history and usually a quip about one or more of the dignitaries on the platform with him.
He served as editor of a two-volume history of families with deep roots here, in 1985 and 1988. The Society of North Carolina Historians recognized him as the Historian of Western North Carolina in 1989. He chaired the Henderson County Sesquicentennial Celebration Committee in 1988 and the next year chaired the Henderson County Committee for the Celebration of the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. In 1994, he served as editor of the Henderson County North Carolina Cemeteries, published by the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society. From 2005-2008, he served as chairman of the Henderson County Historic Courthouse board and of the Heritage Museum board. He was a co-author of A Guide to Historic Henderson County, North Carolina in 2007.
He has also served as president of the Henderson County Apple Festival, chair of the Henderson County Farm City Board, member of the Pardee Hospital Board of Directors, president of the South Carolina Baptist Historical Society and president of the Kentucky Historical Society.

‘A huge loss’

People who knew Jones expressed surprise that he had died, despite his age, because they had seen him recently in good condition, alert and cordial as ever, and because it seemed as if he’d always be there doing what he had always done — serving on the Apple Festival board, praying at a Republican Party convention, digging into his genealogical memory bank to help a family tree researcher find some obscure Henderson County connection.
Jeff Miller, the Hendersonville City Council member and downtown drycleaning business owner, had just run into Jones on Tuesday at Pop’s Diner.
“He was still doing well,” Miller said. “He had a grip that would rival anybody’s when he was shaking hands. We cut up a little bit about politics and just life in general.”
Although county leaders later drafted Miller to help start the Heritage Museum, there would have been no building to house it had Jones not persuaded, cajoled and shamed political leaders into funding the project. The Historic Courthouse committee led by Jones and Spence Campbell pushed the commissioners to pay for the restoration of the 1905 building, which had stood vacant and moldering on Main Street for 10 years.
“That was a whole lot more him than me,” Miller said. “I give him and his group credit for getting that done. There sure were a lot of folks that wanted to tear it down basically. I was adamant against that. As a kid I spent a lot of time sneaking into the place and sitting in that balcony until they threw me out. He didn’t want to hear about tearing it down, and he was dead right and that’s an anchor for the city now. We’d all be sick about it if it hadn’t happened. Then he worked to start the museum.”
Jovial and inclined to build consensus in most instances, Jones could unleash a Baptist fire-and-brimstone delivery when necessary.
“He had a cane he carried,” Miller said. “I remember one time we were debating something and he lifted that cane up and stuck it right in the person’s face across the table. He was very passionate about what he wanted. … It’s a huge loss. It just makes us weaker.”

Breakfast club crossfire

McCray Benson, president of the Henderson County Community Foundation, has known Jones since he first arrived in town in 2005.
“We actually originally met because I eat breakfast every morning and he had this breakfast group,” Benson said. “There was (former mayor) Don Michalove, Dr. Sam Falvo, (apple farmer) Harley Blackwell and a few others, and George invited me over to the table and said, ‘Aren’t you the new guy at the Community Foundation?’ So I joined that group. He said, ‘Don’t sit here if you don’t have thick skin.’”
Benson turned out to be thick-skinned enough but found that most of the crossfire was between the old-timers.
“They talked politics, they talked about the community, they threw jokes at each other,” he said. “They’d get off on the Democrats and Republicans. It was amazing. It was a great way to get a good picture of the longer history of the community. George might talk about a specific event but he could very quickly talk about where it fits in the big picture. Honestly, I was always curious to know which was the truth and which was a tall tale but they wouldn’t tell me. ‘You need to go find out,’ George would say.”
As far as Jones was concerned, a stranger was just a friend waiting to happen.
“If there was somebody new sitting in the restaurant and they came in fairly regularly he’d go introduce himself and ask who they were and where they were from,” Benson said. “He got to know a couple who would come down seasonally from Michigan and they still ask about him. They were fairly recent to our community. He always asked their name and he would trail their name back to the first thing he could it connect to.”
As it turned out, Tuesday was also the last time Benson saw Jones. Benson had breakfast with what’s left of the group of oldtimers. Although he could be a raconteur, Jones “had a serious nature,” Benson said. “The last thing he said when I left him at his car was, ‘Come see me.’ That always meant he had something he wanted to say.”

‘A force of nature’

A staunch Republican, Jones attended many national presidential nominating conventions. He served as a delegate from Kentucky to two National Republican Conventions and later was a member of the North Carolina Electoral College. The Henderson County Republican Club presented him with a Golden Elephant award. He also received the Order of the Longleaf Pine, one of the state’s highest civilian honors.
“I met George Jones at the Republican National Convention in 1980, the Reagan convention,” said Carolyn Justus, who succeeded her husband in the state House after his death in 2002. “Larry was a delegate and he came upstairs. I was in the balcony watching with little kids. He gave me a badge and he said, ‘There’s a man down there from Kentucky who said he’s my cousin. I want you to go down and meet him.’ So I did. I knew him in a lot of ways, through politics, through the General Assembly and he was a cousin of Larry’s.
“I think it probably took George Jones to save the Courthouse,” she said. “He was very instrumental in it and I think the fact that he worked so hard in something he believed in helped it come true because people had a lot of respect for him. And I think the same thing of the Genealogical Society. I don’t know of anybody else that could have done that and get the building for it.”
Patricia Bradley, the producer of the documentary about Jones’s life, had been working on adding Hendersonville and Henderson County material to the movie.
“She wanted to have it at the Historic Museum and I had asked her to add some things in Henderson County and we had planned on doing that this spring,” Justus said. “I knew him well, he was a good friend, he was always good to me and good to Henderson County.”
Bradley said on Saturday that she had been editing the film, based on interviews with Jones and scanned copies of photographs of his life and times.
“I needed to include courthouse footage and we were so lucky that we did have Dr. Jones and I spent the last month talking to him about it,” she said. “The last month we had spent together in our Thursday sessions talking about Hendersonville and that was all to be edited down for a May screening. He was such a force of nature. I’m just so glad we had so many hours together to try to grasp the tip of the iceberg of all the information.”
When Bradley first screened the film on Sunday, Jan. 10, a crowd of people overwhelmed the Historic Depot in Saluda. She had to show it a second time so the overflow crowd could get in.

‘Never forgot where he was from’

Morgan, the Saluda storekeeper, was in the audience to see the documentary about his good friend a month ago.
“He wanted me to come here and see it,” Morgan said. “He was just as alert then as he ever was. He was the type of person that was willing to help anybody that needed help at any time and he was always willing to fill in the blank in genealogy for families. He told me stuff about the Morgans that I would have never known if hadn’t been for him. He’s never been down here where I didn’t learn something I didn’t know.”
“I’ve probably known him 50 years or better and I’ve known him more so in the last 10 years than I did the ones before,” he added. “He’s been a great contributor to Hendersonville and Henderson County and Saluda basically all his life. His accomplishment in life is beyond belief really, that he did all he did in his lifetime — the Courthouse. He was on the board of Pardee Hospital. The Courthouse would not be there if it hadn’t been for him. And he didn’t do it just here. He did it everywhere he went.”
“He’s been a great inspiration to me. He’s one of the few icons of Saluda that went off and did a lot of things and he never forgot where he was from.”
“He came down here about once or twice a month,” he said. “He’d come down and sit and talk to us. And he loved cherry ice cream. My daughter would always bring him a cup of cherry ice cream.”
His mind was a steel vault of history, events, family connections going back to the Cherokee Indian times.
“He never forgot a face,” Morgan said. “If he met you once he knew who you were the next time he saw and was just as cordial as ever. I’ve never asked him about anything that he couldn’t tell me about. It was almost like he had a photographic memory. He’s sure going to be missed. And we’re going to wish we’d asked him another thousand questions.”

An informative trip

In more recent years, when Jones was in his 80s, he usually accompanied by Jimmy Freeman, another county native who traces his roots back to the early 1800s.
“When I closed up the newsstand in the year 2000 I got to be his driver,” Feeman said. “He wasn’t driving and I didn’t have anything to do and I started hauling him around. We’ve been from one end of the state to the other end of the state. About every day I got to see him and all. Every trip was informative to me. I learned something. We’d go to different cemeteries and things like that. We especially liked going this time of year because the leaves were off the trees and you could see everything. We’d talk about everything from A to Z.”
Freeman loved Jones’s Sunday school class.
“He knew everything about the Bible, when he came into a Sunday school class he was prepared and had everything and we'd go right through the lesson,” he said. “When he was a Sunday school teacher we made a point to visit shut-ins. We’d make a point to go by and visit with those. If they weren’t home he’d call ’em up on the phone and talk to ’em.”
Freeman recalled many times a visitor would walk into the History Center looking to trace their family’s roots.
“And he’d say, ‘Are you kin to so and so?’ and they’d yes and he knew the whole family history before they started asking what they were looking for,” he said. “He’ll be missed around here because of all his knowledge and everything.”

* * * * *

Survivors include his daughters Alexia Helsley, and her husband, Terry, of Columbia, S.C., Martha Denka, and her husband, George, of Blythewood, S.C., and Georgeanne Hammond, of Hendersonville; his son, Uel Jones, and his wife, Pat Youngblood, of Mountain View, Calif.
The family is making plans for a funeral service at First Baptist Church in Hendersonville. Thos. Shepherd & Son Funeral Director is handling arrangements.