Covering the same ground as the major motion picture The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, this is the extraordinary true story of the anti-slavery Southern farmer who brought together poor whites, army deserters and runaway slaves to fight the Confederacy in deepest Mississippi. "Moving and powerful." -- The Washington Post. In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against it. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within the South.

Across a century, Victoria Bynum reinterprets the cultural, social, and political meaning of Mississippi's longest civil war, waged in the Free State of Jones, the southeastern Mississippi county that was home to a Unionist stronghold during the Civil War and home to a large and complex mixed-race community in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Many travelers have passed through Jones County over the years and remember the oak-lined streets in the county seat of Trenton, the impressive courthouse, and the old Brock Mill with its gentle overflow and cypress-covered pond. Others remember the southern homes in the towns of Maysville and Pollocksville, and the brick plantation home of the Foscue family just north of Pollocksville. Though Jones County was settled as an extension of New Bern in the early eighteenth century, it came into its own during the antebellum period with substantial plantation homes, often featuring two-story porches. The distance between these homes, set upon a flat landscape of cleared agricultural fields, and separated by the meandering Trent and White Oak rivers, pocosins, and forestlands, only added to their individual grandeur. This book offers a glimpse of these historic resources. Initiated as a countywide survey in the late 1990s, it is the culmination of years of additional fieldwork and research designed to add context to the individual buildings and agricultural structures along with a sense of the people who had inhabited them. Though many of these structures have disappeared with time, documented only through photographs and drawings, much of the rich architectural heritage of the county is still visible today. Of almost equal importance, Jones County retains its rural character, including its managed forestlands and vast open landscapes of cultivated fields of cotton, tobacco, corn, and soybeans. It is our sincere hope that The Architectural History of Jones County, North Carolina will provide readers with a deeper appreciation of the rich and diversified heritage of this unique county in the southeastern coastal plain of North Carolina.

Legend of the Free State of Jones was the first authoritative explanation of just what did happen in Jones County in 1864 to give rise to the legend and now to a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey.

By: Carolyn White Williams Pub. 1957, Reprint 2020, 1128 pages, Index, Hard Cover, 0-89308-872-2. Jones County was created in 1807 from Baldwin County. It is located in the center of the state. Originally know for its farm lands before the Civil War, it suffered destruction during the Civil War as Sherman's march to the sea passing through the county due to it cotton gin factor being retrofitted to produce pistols for the Confederate Army. This book is similar to other history books of the era with such topics being discussed: preformation of the county, formation of the county, Indians, early settlers, involvement in the War of 1812, education, religion/churches, towns, roads/trails, and considerable amout of discussion of its involvement in the Civil War. The author has included inscriptions from 40 cemeteries from around the county. She has also included the history of 22 ante-bellum homes located in Jones County and often times giving a biographical sketch of its owner: Clinton, Gordon-Bowen-Blount, Comer, Small, Newton, Peyton, Pitts, Cabaniss, Day-Barron, Barron, Glawson, Lancaster, Greene, White, Roberts, Moughon, Tomotavia, Johnson, and Lowther. But more importantly are the 80 plus genealogies of persons from the county. The reader will also discover an appendix filled with genealogical data: 1811 Tax Digest, 1820 Census, 1826 Land Lottery Draws, Marriage Bonds 1811-1890, Slave Deed Records 1791-1865, Index of Wills 1808-1890, Abstracts of Wills 1808-1810, List of Revolutionary Soldiers and Widows of Soldiers, Roster of Confederate Soldiers, WWI and WWII, Index to 1850 Census, and List of Garnd Jurors 1808-1810.