JoCoYo

October 1912: A man steps off a train in Clayton, North Carolina, carrying a heavy secret hidden beneath fifty pounds of camera gear. He is Lewis Hine, a former schoolteacher turned investigator, sent by the National Child Labor Committee to expose the harsh reality hidden inside the town's booming cotton mill.

In this episode of JoCoYo, we pull back the curtain on a town once considered the most prosperous of its size in the world, where the promise of steady wages meant twelve-hour workdays for men, women, and children alike. Discover how Ashley Horne built an industrial empire from the wreckage of the Civil War, and join us as we follow the photographer who walked into the heart of that empire to document the truth—while the superintendent watched him work in silence.

In 1901, a barn dance in Selma sparked a full-blown war between a preacher, a deacon, and a fiddler. What started as a night of music and foot-stomping turned into a courthouse case, a community divide, and a story that still echoes in Johnston County history. And yes, we’ll talk about Kevin Bacon too.

John Lawson knew the Tuscarora better than almost any Englishman alive. He ate at their tables, learned their names, wrote the book that advertised their land to English settlers — and then paddled up the Neuse River to scout the next wave of encroachment. The Tuscarora stopped his canoe. They put him on trial. He lost his temper. That was the last mistake he ever made. Today on JoCoYo — the Tuscarora War, and the man who saw it coming and helped cause it anyway.

In 1771, Samuel Johnston handed the colonial governor the legal weapon he needed to crush a farmer uprising over taxation without representation. In 1776, Samuel Johnston led the movement for independence over — and I want you to really sit with this — taxation without representation. History is full of villains and heroes. Johnston County's founding lawyer was just... both.

Imagine writing the menu, prepping the kitchen, and getting pulled out mid-service — and then the review says the food was unremarkable. That is, more or less, what history did to James Iredell Junior. Governor, Senator, Supreme Court nephew, and author of three volumes of North Carolina case law. Today on JoCoYo, we're pulling him out of the footnotes.

It's 1779. You live in Smithfield, North Carolina — population: several dozen, ambitions: modest. Then one Thursday morning, the entire government of North Carolina comes riding down the road. All of it. And it needs a place to sleep. Running on Empty — the story of the time the state ran out of options and showed up unannounced in a two-year-old town.

In 1792, a Johnston County man left his son a still in his will. It seemed straightforward enough. Two hundred years, ten federal indictments, that tradition is now open Thursday through Saturday with tours and a tasting room. Welcome to White Lightning. The government gave up. Johnston County=1, Government=0. This is White Lightning.

People who visit Hannah Creek Swamp report cold spots, feelings of dread, and the sound of a hanging. Johnston County has a lot of history, but this particular stretch of swamp has a story soaked into it — a Confederate lieutenant, a band of rogue soldiers who crossed every line, a gold crucifix found around the wrong neck, and a revenge killing so far outside the rules of war that nobody's quite known what to do with it for 160 years. It's a ghost story. It's a war crime story. It's also, it turns out, a case of mistaken identity stretching across two centuries — because the monster at the center of it was already dead before the Civil War started. The swamp, apparently, does not care about the timeline.

It could have been a great April Fool's joke if it weren't so...yikes!

In May 2021, a Russian criminal gang broke into the largest fuel pipeline in America using one password. One forgotten, inactive, nobody-bothered-to-delete-it password. Within 72 hours, three quarters of North Carolina's gas stations were empty. People were fighting in line at a Marathon station in Knightdale. Someone issued an official government warning asking people to please stop filling plastic bags with gasoline. The pipeline that caused all of this runs right through Selma, on the same road everything in Johnston County has always run along. It has been that way for three hundred years. Turns out that's also a vulnerability.

In March 1865, Sherman's army stood poised to burn Raleigh to the ground. What stopped it wasn't a general, a battle, or a treaty — it was a railroad stationmaster with no rank, no uniform, and a white flag he had no authority to wave. This is the story of how a desperate ride through Johnston County's pine woods, a "brisk skirmish" five miles east of Clayton, and a peace parley at a white frame house on the town square saved North Carolina's capital — and quietly set the stage for the largest Confederate surrender in the entire war.