Lakeport Legacies · April 26 · Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House · Dr. Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation)
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Lakeport Legacies · April 26 · Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House · Dr. Blake Wintory (Lakeport Plantation)
Lakeport Plantation director, Dr. Blake Wintory, will begin 2018’s Lakeport Legacies with the presentation “Rev. Green Hill Jones: From Slavery to the State House” on April 26.
Rev. Green Hill Jones was one of over a dozen African-American men from southeast Arkansas who served in the Arkansas General Assembly between 1868 and 1893. Born a slave in Maury County, Tennessee in 1842, Jones was brought four years later to Kenneth Rayner’s Grand Lake cotton plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas. A young man when the Civil War began, Jones joined the Union Army at Memphis in 1863. After the Civil War, he became an ordained minister and received an education in the North. He returned to Chicot County in 1873 and was soon elected county treasurer (1874-1876), county assessor (1876-1878), and to two terms in the Arkansas House (1885, 1889).
Wintory will tell his story from church and school records, and interviews with Jones and others contained in his Civil War-era pension file.
Rev. G. H. Jones served in the Arkansas General Assembly in 1885 and 1889. Courtesy of the Old State House Museum.
