Jones County... We're Still Making History

Less than a decade after Mississippi became the country’s 20th state, settlers carved out a 700-square mile of pine forests and streams for a new county in 1826. They named it Jones County, after John Paul Jones, the early American Naval hero who rose from humble Scottish origins to military success during the American Revolution.

Those early years weren’t easy for the settlers and farmers who pushed their way west during America’s continental expansion. Economic hard times during the 1830s and 1840s thinned their ranks as many left for greener pastures elsewhere. The Civil War brought a new set of difficulties, not only from threatening Union forces, but from Jones County’s fellow confederates – the hard years before the war had bred an independent-minded people in the region, many of them not in step with the Southern cause.

Timber is King

Following the war and Reconstruction, industrialists from the north came south to seek their fortunes through one of Mississippi’s most abundant resources – timber. Jones County, rich in this natural resource, began to flourish with this new economic activity.

Three families, the Eastmans, Gardiners and Rogers, moved from Iowa to find new stands of uncut timber. They settled in a small town emerging from one of the early lumber camps, and named for a lovely flower that once inundated the region’s virgin forests: Laurel. They brought more than their business acumen; they inculcated their belief in the blending of economic, social, educational and aesthetic progress in the fabric of the growing city. Their influence is preserved today in the schools and tree-lined streets of Laurel, and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.

New Industries and Innovations Breathe Fresh Economic Life

Unfortunately, the myriad timber interests depleted the forests, and timber production fell dramatically in the early Twentieth Century. Jones County once again found itself at an economic nadir. But innovation and adaptation soon arose to ease the loss. Emerging industries of oil and poultry, particularly Sanderson Farms, began to rise at mid-century. The wood product industry itself received a needed boost when William Mason invented a new process for steam pressing wood chips into sheets – known the world over as Masonite. Masonite remains to this day a strong economic force in Jones County.

After World War II, Jones County saw the growth of a strong industrial manufacturing base that more than equaled the agricultural industries that had flourished before. One such success story began in 1968 when a young Jones Countian named Billy Howard returned home to begin a business building electrical transformers.

Today, Howard Industries enjoys forty-percent market share of the $1.2 Billion U.S. electrical transformer industry, and is the third-largest maker of electronic and magnetic ballasts in the country. Howard is also leading the way in the newest wave of economic development in Jones County – the rise of high technology research, development and industry, epitomized in the new Howard Technology Park in Ellisville.

This steady growth of industry, education and culture has given rise to an ethnically-diverse population of over 65,000 inhabitants. One hundred and eighty years of progress has produced a people proud of their heritage and eager to go further.