J[ohn]. W. JONES
— County Superintendent of Schools J. W. Jones, of Vinton, has enjoyed
a literary and business training which makes him an ideal incumbent of
this office. He is a native of Adams county, Ohio, and was born in
February, 1862, but has been a resident of Benton county since 1892,
when he came to the west.
Mr. Jones is of pure Welsh descent, but his paternal grandfather,
Ephraim Jones, was a New York farmer who moved to Ohio at an early day.
Ephraim Jones married Miss Roxy A. Tracy, of Adams county, Ohio, and
died on his Ohio farm about 1856, his widow surviving him until 1880,
her last years being spent in Illinois. The offspring of this union
were as follows: William, a pioneer school teacher, who became a large
land owner in Illinois and died unmarried in his twenty-eighth year;
John M., who inherited the property of his brother William in Douglas
county, Illinois, and married Miss Hannah H. Fields, - Noah T., father
of J. W. Jones, born in 1835, was a farmer in Adams county. Ohio,
married Miss Palmyra Easter in 1861, and soon afterward enlisted in the
Seventieth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, dying at Memphis, Tennessee, while
in the Union army; Mary Ann, who was the wife of Crawford Ralston, of
Adams county; Rebecca, who became Mrs. James Caraskadon, and resided in
Indianapolis; Margaret who married John Cook, of Newman, Illinois;
America Jane, who is Mrs. Robert Nelson, of Allerton, Illinois. Of
these children all have passed away except Mrs. Nelson. The maternal
grandfather of Superintendent Jones was of German descent, a son of
Nicholas and Margaret Easter.
At the time of his father's death, J. W. Jones was an infant, and being
an only child was reared by his maternal grandfather. The mother of Mr.
Jones died in 1897, at Mount Auburn, where she made her home with her
son. Mr. Jones obtained his early education in the common schools of
Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, and taught for two years before he
completed his course in the North Liberty Academy, at Cherry Fork,
Ohio. He taught three years in the rural schools of Ohio, two years in
the rural schools of Coles county, Illinois, and for the same length of
time was principal of the graded school at Humboldt. In the meantime he
had taken a special course in higher mathematics, penmanship and the
sciences at Valparaiso, Indiana, and then finished a course in the
Commercial College of the Kentucky University at Lexington, Kentucky.
From Illinois he returned to Ohio in 1888, and for the succeeding four
years was a merchant. On November 7, 1892, Mr. Jones arrived in Mount
Auburn, Iowa, and during the following fourteen years served much of
the time as principal of the village schools. He was elected to the
superintendency of the Benton county schools in 1906, and is now in the
second term of an energetic and progressive administration. Mr. Jones
is a thorough scholar and teacher. He is a Republican and connected
with the Methodist Protestant church.
On April 8, 1888, he married Miss Enna Black, and their two sons, David
T. and Paul G., are both attending school at Vinton. The parents of
Mrs. Jones, David S. and Sarah (Foster) Black, were natives of Ohio and
came to Benton county in 1853. They entered two hundred and forty acres
of land near Mount Auburn, and eighty-six acres in Taylor township,
northwest of Vinton. They remained in the county but a few weeks,
returning to Ohio, where Mr. Black died in the early seventies. Mrs.
Black died in Vinton January 4, 1908. An incident worthy of notice is
the fact that when they left Benton county for Ohio in June, 1853, they
traveled through a snow storm all the way to Cedar Rapids.
Picture of John W. Jones
