WHO WAS BOB JONES?
His name is on Southlake’s largest park, a road, and the city’s nature center and preserve. So who was he?
Born into slavery, Bob and his wife, Almeady Chisum Jones, overcame the challenges of a mixed-race heritage with integrity and hard work, earning the respect of all who knew them. Newly uncovered documents, pictures and family heirlooms give fresh insight into their story.
Bob’s sister, Ellen, married Plez McConnell in 1874 in Denton. In this photo, circa 1920, members of the extended Jones family gathered at the McConnell’s Oklahoma home. Those visiting included, standing second from left, Elnora Williams, who in 1928 would marry Emory, seated third from left. Standing third from left is a Jones daughter, Artie. Almeady Chisum Jones is seated sixth from the left, next to Ellen and Plez.
Into the 1960s, the Texas Joneses and the Arkansas Joneses (Leazer’s two families) kept in touch. Two people in this 1940s photograph are Bob’s half-siblings: Roxie, third from the left, and Jink, fifth from the left. Jink, also known as Captain Jink, was named for a song popular post-Civil War, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. For some reason, the “s” was left off his name. In 2020, the wife of Jink’s grandson helped us with research on Leazer.
Virgie, who married James Evans in 1906 on the front porch of the family home, was the first daughter to become a bride. Over the next 20 years, each of her five sisters would marry on the same spot on the front porch. “All the girls made their husbands [to be] ask Daddy,” Eugie recalled. “His response was always the same: Now, if you take them away, I don’t want you to mistreat them, and if you can’t make a living for them, then you bring them back home. Wasn’t any of them that ever had to come back home.”
Eugie made a veil that they all wore. Unfortunately, it was lost in the 1948 homeplace fire.
Bob and Almeady purchased the organ from a cross-country peddler, according to family members who remember it sitting in the Jones parlor. Today, it sits the home of Marie Evans Grigsby, Virgie and James’ granddaughter.
In 2010, Anita Witt, who owned the former Chisum ranch near Bolivar in Denton County, invited the Jones family to have a reunion at the ranch. Anita is seen in the center of this reunion photo in a red checkered shirt and wind-brimmed hat.
These fans from the 1950s-’60s were found in the 1990s at an abandoned house in the Jones community. Fans were often passed out at church and at funerals.
The church, according to grandson Bobby Jones, was a white wooden building about 25-by-40 feet in size. No steeple, no coat room no special ornamentation like a cross or stained glass. No pulpitjust a podium that the preacher stood behind and five benches on each side. A “circuit rider” preacher came once a month. Each summer there was a weeklong revival. Standing outside the doorway to the church are, left to right, McKinley Thomas; James Evans; Virgie Jones Evans; Emory Jones; Eugie Jones Thomas and Mrs. Henley, Virgie’s sister-in-law.
The Jones family looked forward to “dinner on the grounds,” held at the church or, as in this picture (date unknown), in the yard of the homeplace. Everyone brought a favorite dish: fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, baked chicken, stewed chicken, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, purple-hulled peas, cabbage, pinto beans, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, cornbread and more. For dessert, sweet potato pie, peach and berry cobblers and pound cake. Usually iced tea and lemonade to drink.
In the 1950s, grandsons Bill (by door) and Bobby (looking in the windows alongside the building) visited Walnut Grove School. The eight-grade school was closed in 1951 because its students were moving on to junior and senior high.
“I had a car and some white girlfriends, Norma and Wilma Barnett, who lived on Dove Road, across from the Torians. If we wanted a malt, we would all go into town together, and they would have me sitting in the middle of a booth at the City Drug store. Norma and Wilma would just glare at the people working there, just daring them to say something, but they never did,” Betty said, laughing. “Of course, the people working at the City Drug knew who I was, and they knew the Barnetts, too.”
“I handed out the boutonnieres and corsages at Wilma’s wedding,” Betty said. “Everyone knew me, but it was very strange.”
“I could do everything but go to school and go to the movies – though I did go to the movies a few times,” Betty said. “I remember one summer when our neighbor Ivy would ask Mother if I could go to the movies with her and her daughter, Dorothy. Mama would say, ‘No, I don’t want her going and sitting in the balcony by herself.’ Ivy would say, ‘She isn’t going to sit in the balcony, she’s going to sit with us.’ This was the Palace Theater in Grapevine.”
As soon as they were able, the Jones girls learned to sew. Later they became accomplished seamstresses, sewing their own clothing. As was the custom, they learned from their mother, who learned from hers.
From the black and white sheep on the Chisum ranch, Almeady’s mother Jensie spun yarn and wove cloth to make John enough “gray tweed” for two tailer-made suits a year. Any additional cloth Jensie had time to make was hers to sell.
In the early 1930s, two of Bob’s grandsons, sons of Virgie and James Evans, lived with Mary and Will Lake, Bud Daggett’s daughter and son-in-law, while attending I.M. Terrell High School.
“A room upstairs [at the Jones home] was always available as overnight accommodations to all white people who traveled by there,” remembers Ted Willhoite (1911-2003) of Grapevine. “My grandfather Charlie Winfrey [of Grapevine] told me that he traveled in that part of the country buying cattle and stayed at the Jones home.”
Jinks and Emory were proud to call John Chisum their grandfather. Chisum, says the Texas State Historical Association, was personable and shrewd, primarily a cattle dealer who traveled in search of markets.
Helping to make this quilt were Venora Burns, Hattie Burns, Leona Revels, Viola Gardner, Meady Dillingham, Elnora Jones, Francis Revels, Bula Jones, Meady Jones, Eudora Stinnett, Ella Jones, Virgie Evans, Lorene Evans, Lola Woods, Lula Jones, Rosa Jones, Eula Jones and Artie Clay.
The scraps of fabric show the patterns and colors of the dresses, shirts and aprons that the women made for their families. Almeady purchased her fabrics at Yates Dry Goods in Grapevine.