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Jeremy Jones digs deep into ancestor's 'scandalous diaries'

A parade of unlikely events starts in 1811, when William Thomas Prestwood jots down the first entry in his diary. Leap ahead, way ahead, to 1975, to a pile of trash on a sidewalk outside a dilapidated house in Wadesboro, North Carolina, that’s about to be bulldozed. A man named Steven Scott Smith spots the 28 volumes of hand-bound notebooks, carries them off and over a period of three years tries to peddle them to libraries, universities, historical societies. For these diaries are unusual. They’re written in code. “Most people simply waved him away,” an author writes. “Others studied the pages but then shook their heads and apologized.” Only when Smith makes contact with an archivist in Raleigh, who knew a codebreaker who had retired to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, does the parade of unlikely events take its most meaningful turn: translation. Unless translation happens, Jeremy B. Jones never learns of the diaries. Jeremy doesn’t just learn of the diaries and read them. He learns that the man who wrote them is a forebear. “He was one of ours,” Jones’s grandma tells him. “My great-great granddaddy.” We read all of that in the first chapter of Jones’s new book, Cipher: Decoding my Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries. The son of Joy and David Jones, Jeremy, now a professor of English Studies and creative writing at Western Carolina University, is a graduate of North Henderson High School and Elon University and holds a master’s in fine arts degree from the renowned creative writing program at the University of Iowa. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner and Brevity, among others. He writes frequently for Our State magazine, most recently a profile of Matthew Rogers and his Three-Chopt sandwich shop in downtown Hendersonville and an essay on Hurricane Helene. In the young chapter of his life, Jones, 43, has leaned into the art of the memoir. His first book, Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland , was named the Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction in 2014 and awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. * * * * Cipher is a much different book than Bearwallow. It has a protagonist other than Jones himself, his ancestor William Prestwood. Tracing his 4X-great-grandfather in 50 years of diary entries, Jones draws parallels between his time and ours; he seems determined throughout the journey to find some redemption in Prestwood, tries even to share his observations with him through letters scattered among the Cipher’s 272 pages. I interviewed Jeremy at Trailside Brewing Co. along the Ecusta Trail, a couple of weeks after the September launch of Cipher. I asked him about the research and writing of the book. “I worked on some other things along the way, and nearly quit a few times, but all in all, (it was) a decade long project, I would say,” he told me. I wanted to know why he wanted to quit. “I just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and there were just some research questions that were hard to figure out for a while, and I really wanted to get a book done,” he said. “So for a while I started working on this novel, and I was like, I’ll just write it first. And then I eventually came back to it.” He's still writing the novel, which involves a retired woman in Asheville working to solve an old murder mystery. * * * * Throughout Cipher, Jones weaves the thread of slavery into the fabric. William Prestwood and his family were slave-holders and, Jones is certain, William fathered children with Biner, an enslaved woman who lived in his home for much of his life. “I connected with people on (the DNA site) ‘23 and me’ who were black Americans, related to me four generations back, but we can’t say specifically that it was Biner” who was the mother. “For them, their family trees disappear. We can guess, and we know that we’re related somewhere.” Jones is grateful that Steven Smith was so determined to find out what the mysterious diaries said. “It feels like at some point he should have given up, but the fact that he kept trying for three years and then eventually found somebody who knew somebody — yeah, it’s unbelievable. You couldn’t write it as fiction,” he says. The archivist-to-codebreaker link was equally crucial. The codebreaker, Nathaniel Browder, “could have just broken the code and said, ‘That’s interesting,’ and kept going, but to transcribe the whole thing, in six, seven years of work …” Why write in code to begin with? Jones says one of the first entries came after a row with Prestwood’s father, Thomas, of which there were many. But the most obvious reason, he says, is to conceal the dozens of trysts and affairs with women. An article about the secret journals in the Asheville Citizen Times in 1979 says Prestwood “kissed the girls all over western North Carolina during the course of his lifetime. But he was true to the gentleman’s code: he didn’t tell.” The book has won rave critiques from critics and Jones’s fellow authors. “I’ve never read a book this deliciously dark, scathingly funny and deeply felt,” the North Carolina novelist Wiley Cash writes. “Readers will not forget Cipher, nor the journey this story took to land in Jeremy Jones’s hands, nor their own trembling hands as they rapturously turned its pages.” * * * * From the diarist’s own words, we learn of his work over five decades as a farmer, schoolteacher, surveyor and mapmaker, self-taught astronomer, avid watcher and chronicler of birds and other wildlife, constable even. “He clearly was a restless soul, because every 10 years, he’s shifting. He’s gold mining for a while and he’s doing this,” Jones says. “My best guess in the curiosity that shows up all over the place — where he’s dissecting things and charting birds — is he is someone who just has to keep looking for things, searching things out.” When William marries, he and Celia have a brood of children and those children have children. Celia precedes William in death by 10 months. “He is an old man but life abounds.” In September 1859, William “digs new veins and continues to not find gold,” Jeremy writes at the tail end of Cipher. “He writes and appears in court but as the fall of 1859 drags on, William’s days run out of ink.” It is our good fortune that the days of Jeremy Jones, son of Edneyville, have not run out of ink, nor are they likely to for decades to come.

By Bill Moss, Published: November 15, 2025

A parade of unlikely events starts in 1811, when William Thomas Prestwood jots down the first entry in his diary.

Leap ahead, way ahead, to 1975,  to a pile of trash on a sidewalk outside a dilapidated house in Wadesboro, North Carolina, that’s about to be bulldozed. A man named Steven Scott Smith spots the 28 volumes of hand-bound notebooks, carries them off and over a period of three years tries to peddle them to libraries, universities, historical societies. For these diaries are unusual. They’re written in code. “Most people simply waved him away,” an author writes. “Others studied the pages but then shook their heads and apologized.”

Only when Smith makes contact with an archivist in Raleigh, who knew a codebreaker who had retired to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, does the parade of unlikely events take its most meaningful turn: translation. Unless translation happens, Jeremy B. Jones never learns of the diaries. Jeremy doesn’t just learn of the diaries and read them. He learns that the man who wrote them is a forebear. “He was one of ours,” Jones’s grandma tells him. “My great-great granddaddy.”

We read all of that in the first chapter of Jones’s new book, Cipher: Decoding my Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries.

The son of Joy and David Jones, Jeremy, now a professor of English Studies and creative writing at Western Carolina University, is a graduate of North Henderson High School and Elon University and holds a master’s in fine arts degree from the renowned creative writing program at the University of Iowa. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner and Brevity, among others. He writes frequently for Our State magazine, most recently a profile of Matthew Rogers and his Three-Chopt sandwich shop in downtown Hendersonville and an essay on Hurricane Helene.

In the young chapter of his life, Jones, 43, has leaned into the art of the memoir. His first book, Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland , was named the Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction in 2014 and awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

* * * *

Cipher is a much different book than Bearwallow. It has a protagonist other than Jones himself, his ancestor William Prestwood. Tracing his 4X-great-grandfather in 50 years of diary entries, Jones draws parallels between his time and ours; he seems determined throughout the journey to find some redemption in Prestwood, tries even to share his observations with him through letters scattered among the Cipher’s 272 pages.

I interviewed Jeremy at Trailside Brewing Co. along the Ecusta Trail, a couple of weeks after the September launch of Cipher. I asked him about the research and writing of the book.

“I worked on some other things along the way, and nearly quit a few times, but all in all, (it was) a decade long project, I would say,” he told me.

I wanted to know why he wanted to quit.

“I just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and there were just some research questions that were hard to figure out for a while, and I really wanted to get a book done,” he said. “So for a while I started working on this novel, and I was like, I’ll just write it first. And then I eventually came back to it.”

He's still writing the novel, which involves a retired woman in Asheville working to solve an old murder mystery.

* * * *

Throughout Cipher, Jones weaves the thread of slavery into the fabric. William Prestwood and his family were slave-holders and, Jones is certain, William fathered children with Biner, an enslaved woman who lived in his home for much of his life.

“I connected with people on (the DNA site) ‘23 and me’ who were black Americans, related to me four generations back, but we can’t say specifically that it was Biner” who was the mother. “For them, their family trees disappear. We can guess, and we know that we’re related somewhere.”

Jones is grateful that Steven Smith was so determined to find out what the mysterious diaries said.

“It feels like at some point he should have given up, but the fact that he kept trying for three years and then eventually found somebody who knew somebody — yeah, it’s unbelievable. You couldn’t write it as fiction,” he says. The archivist-to-codebreaker link was equally crucial.

The codebreaker, Nathaniel Browder, “could have just broken the code and said, ‘That’s interesting,’ and kept going, but to transcribe the whole thing, in six, seven years of work …”

Why write in code to begin with?

Jones says one of the first entries came after a row with Prestwood’s father, Thomas, of which there were many. But the most obvious reason, he says, is to conceal the dozens of trysts and affairs with women.

An article about the secret journals in the Asheville Citizen Times in 1979 says Prestwood “kissed the girls all over western North Carolina during the course of his lifetime. But he was true to the gentleman’s code: he didn’t tell.”

The book has won rave critiques from critics and Jones’s fellow authors.

“I’ve never read a book this deliciously dark, scathingly funny and deeply felt,” the North Carolina novelist Wiley Cash writes. “Readers will not forget Cipher, nor the journey this story took to land in Jeremy Jones’s hands, nor their own trembling hands as they rapturously turned its pages.”

* * * *

From the diarist’s own words, we learn of his work over five decades as a farmer, schoolteacher, surveyor and mapmaker, self-taught astronomer, avid watcher and chronicler of birds and other wildlife, constable even.

“He clearly was a restless soul, because every 10 years, he’s shifting. He’s gold mining for a while and he’s doing this,” Jones says. “My best guess in the curiosity that shows up all over the place — where he’s dissecting things and charting birds — is he is someone who just has to keep looking for things, searching things out.”

When William marries, he and Celia have a brood of children and those children have children. Celia precedes William in death by 10 months. “He is an old man but life abounds.”

In September 1859, William “digs new veins and continues to not find gold,” Jeremy writes at the tail end of Cipher. “He writes and appears in court but as the fall of 1859 drags on, William’s days run out of ink.”

It is our good fortune that the days of Jeremy Jones, son of Edneyville, have not run out of ink, nor are they likely to for decades to come.