Peninsula In Passage

Keeping Up with the Joneses Retired Judge William Wellington Jones, born in 1921 and his sister Frances Jones Cleveland, born in 1925, can look back on seven generations of family in the Driver area and reel off stories about them as if they had happened last week. The family was involved in the founding of Glebe Episcopal Church in 1738 and some were aboard schooners that ran the Union blockades during the Civil War. After the war, the judge says, when the slaves were freed, violence was rampant and the freed slaves refused to work. Large farms were split up and sold with no labor to work them. From raising cotton, families turned to truck (produce) and shipped their harvest to market on the water, and later overland by truck. From the potato packing shed to the judicial bench, William Wellington Jones spent most of his life in his hometown – the village of Driver. He remembers from his childhood - Driver looked “very much like it does now - downtown Driver especially - except there are more houses there now. I remember riding with mother in the Model T to get mail at the post office. The canvas roof blew back into the car and a man came along to help her fasten down the top of the car. The main – and only – grocery store was on the village intersection and I can remember five to seven passenger trains a day at the station, picking up a few people and delivering three mails a day. Arthur’s store was built in 1928 and Driver Supply shortly after that. Any plane that flew overhead was remarkable. I saw the blimp USS Los Angeles fly over. People in Driver were always visiting around. We fished in the Nansemond and all of Driver went to Ocean View for a fishing trip every year in August. The blizzard of March 1927 was a storm I didn’t forget – everything was marked from time of the big storm. Amedeo Obici and his mule, cart and driver went into a ravine on the curve of the road near my house. I went to Driver Elementary School in two classrooms in the old gym, the Darden/ Odom Memorial Gym, named for two boys who were killed in World War I. There were only 75 people in the whole school.

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Judge William Wellington Jones and his cousin Anne White