News

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: George Jones lighted the past and the future

George A. Jones, as a young man.

By Bill Moss, Published: February 15, 2016

It is a testament to Dr. George A. Jones’s vitality that people who knew him well expressed shock when they learned of his passing on Friday.

At age 95, Jones was still active in the community, church life and civic affairs and he kept alive the historic flame for Henderson County and his beloved hometown of Saluda. He was emphatically unlike that other George Jones, the country crooner whose drinking habit earned him the derisive sobriquet of “No Show” Jones.
George Alexander Jones might have been called “Never Absent” or “Always Here” or “Sure to Show” Jones.
Born Aug. 2, 1920, in Saluda to Martha Ida Constant Jones and Uel Garfield Jones, George Alexander Jones was the last surviving of the couple’s eight children. In interviews with the Hendersonville Lightning, friends and admirers — it was impossible to be one without being the other — commented on his generosity of spirit, his ability for getting done things and his knowledge of everything from Genesis to Revelation, from birth records to cemetery locations, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush.
Dr. Jones, his daughters and son wrote in an obituary, “was a dedicated and committed minister, educator, historian, and public servant — a man of vision with the skills and perseverance to make dreams reality.”
“His accomplishment in life is beyond belief really,” said his friend Leon Morgan. “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.”

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Indeed, although he was the opposite of slow-witted protagonist in the book and movie, Jones lived a life that was almost Forest Gump-like in its sweep and influence. His suffering of close personal loss in his formative years — an older brother died in a car crash and a younger sister drowned — must have made him appreciate the fragility of human life and the imperative of a deeper faith in making one’s time on earth meaningful.
We imagine Dr. Jones — Forrest Gump like — popping up over and over in a newsreel of the 20th century.
Here is World War II, and 1st Lt. George Alexander Jones, an Army chaplain, ministering to the troops. Here’s desegregation in the South, and George Alexander Jones leading the peaceful desegregation effort in Beaufort, S.C., amid the Low Country cotton and rice fields where slaves had worked. Here is the 1950s labor force in those same fields, and George Alexander Jones, with his wife, Evelyn, beside him, creating one of the first ministries to help seasonal migrant workers. Here is the decline in the Sixties and Seventies of the Democratic Party’s Solid South and the rise of the Republican Party, and George Alexander Jones working to resurrect the GOP in Beaufort. Here is the pivot of the national party to Ronald Reagan and the politics of personal magnetism, and George Alexander Jones casting ballots as a national convention delegate from Kentucky and North Carolina.

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Closer to home, Jones was involved as part of the South Carolina Baptist Foundation in the decision to move Furman University to its current campus. Because of Dr. Jones, Hendersonville has a Genealogical and Historic Society that local people and visitors can use to trace family trees. Because of Dr. Jones, the Historic Courthouse was turned from a decaying symbol of political inertia to a functioning center of county government and a cultural anchor of Main Street.
He never quit. In the most recent times, Dr. Jones lent his support and reputation to the effort to save the Historic Train Depot in his beloved hometown.
At the History Center in the old Erle Stillwell-designed State Trust Co. and Citizens Bank, which opened three years after Jones was born, family-tree researchers lauded their good fortune if they happened to run into Dr. Jones.
Jimmy Freeman, who was Jones’s friend and driver for many years, recalled those chance meetings. “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,” Freeman said.
That won’t happen anymore, sadly, but we do have the archives, the cemetery books and other records, thanks to George A. Jones. “It just makes us weaker,” Jeff Miller said of Jones’s death. It’s true in the moment. But the long view is that George Jones’s life made us stronger, too. He preached the word, blessed the flock and led men and women to peacefully resolve conflict. He enriched the institutions he led. Knowing first-hand that life could be inexplicably cut short, he lived as if no aspiration was too large to achieve, no wrong too entrenched to right, no mountain too steep to climb.
He spent his life lighting the past, yes, but his lantern also shined light on the present and the future.