JoCoYo

In 1920, a woman in Smithfield sat down and made a decision.

Her husband had just died. He'd been the editor of the Smithfield Herald. She had children, half-ownership of a newspaper she'd never run, and a list of things a widow in Johnston County in 1920 was expected to do.

She walked into the office and started editing the paper instead.

When people asked why, she had an answer ready: she was keeping it for her boys.

That's what she said. Here's what she actually did — she ran the paper for thirteen years, won the first journalism award the North Carolina Press Association ever gave, wrote a column that ran for thirty years, and helped build the Johnston County public library.

While telling everyone she was just holding it together in the meantime.

The official history of Johnston County gives her exactly one sentence.

"The first woman to hold elected office was Luma McLamb, Republican Register of Deeds from 1928 to 1932."

That's it. No paragraph. No chapter. One sentence in a list of firsts.

But here's what that sentence doesn't tell you: she won in a county so reliably Democratic that Republicans controlled it for exactly four years in the entire twentieth century. She served through the stock market crash, and the bank failures, and the first three years of the Great Depression — keeping the county's records while her neighbors sold off land they couldn't afford to keep.

And then the wave that brought her in went back out, and sixty years passed before another woman won a countywide election in Johnston County.

One sentence. She deserves more than that.

#Benson #election #depression

I teach in rural Johnston County. And when I look out at my classroom, I see kids whose great-grandparents farmed this land — and kids whose parents crossed an international border to get here. Families who've been in these communities for two hundred years, sitting next to families who arrived within the last twenty.

Nobody has really sat down and told that story out loud.

So today we're going to talk about chickens. What they became. Who came because of them. And who was already here when they arrived.

#immigration #chicken #agriculture

1998.

Johnston County.

Republicans take control of the county commission for the first time since 1928. The firewall that had held through decades of presidential Republican waves finally breaks.

Same election. Same county. Same year — Dorothy Johnson becomes the first African American ever elected to a countywide office in Johnston County's history.

Two stories. Running in opposite directions. Happening at the same time.

How does that happen? And what does it tell us about what Johnston County was becoming?

This time on JoCoYo: "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

At the turn of the twentieth century, Selma, North Carolina was the biggest town in Johnston County. Bigger than Smithfield. The county seat. A town that had existed since 1777.

Selma beat it — in thirty-three years — starting from a railroad station and a grid of lots.

Then a beetle crossed the Rio Grande. And cotton prices fell to five cents a pound. And three mills closed. And by 1992, there were twenty-five empty buildings on Raiford Street, and a town manager who couldn't sleep.

What do you do when the thing that made you is gone?

There's a town in Johnston County most people know from an exit sign and a story about a possum. Four Oaks. Population around two thousand. Nice little place.

But here's what the founding mythology leaves out: the man who owned the ground.

His name was Isaac Evans. He was Black. His family had been free since the 1700s. And in 1886, when a railroad colonel came looking for land to build a town on, it was Isaac Evans's forty acres that became the footprint of Four Oaks.

Every block. Every deed. Every brick building along that old railroad strip — it all starts with him.

So who was Isaac Evans? Where did his family come from? And why does that phrase — free since the 1700s — point toward one of the most overlooked stories in this county's history?

Gertrude Weil defied NC's 1920 "NO" on women's votes—mailed fire to an unknown Smithfield ally: "THINK RATIFICATION. Make us the PERFECT 36th!" Goldsboro's Jewish firebrand swam first into segregated pools at 80, battled 50 years unbowed. State caved 51 years late. She died 24 days after. Who in JoCo answered her call?

In 1945, Sula Hansley was a girl in a city of ash and ruins. A few years later, she was a woman in a quiet, tobacco-farming town in North Carolina. This episode explores the impossible distance between Berlin’s front lines and Four Oaks’ front porches—and the incredible, untold story of a survivor who built a life in the heart of Johnston County.

From Reconstruction to 1969—a 92-year silence in Johnston County's official history. Were there really no Black elected officials in between? Dive into the Fusion era's lost Black leaders, the Red Shirts' terror, and the laws that erased them from the record. JoCoYo uncovers the deliberate deletion of local Black political power.

Why was a Canadian-born Black actor named on a school in Selma, North Carolina? In this episode of JoCoYo, we trace the surprising story of Richard Berry Harrison, The Green Pastures, and the community that chose his name to stand for generations.