Historic White Plains Cemetery

Historic White Plains Cemetery. . The White Plains Cemetery is typical of family burial grounds once common through our country. These cemeteries were a matter of practicality during the settlement of America due to distances between family farms and churches. Initially dictated by population patterns, plantation burials became a Southern tradition. This cemetery dates to 1780 and is the resting place of Nathaniel Jones (1749-1815), a prominent North Carolinian whose life spanned the Revolutionary War and Federalist era. Jones served as a Wake County Commissioner, Justice of the Peace, Sheriff, and Clerk of Court, and was a member of the General Assembly, the Council of State, and the Constitutional Convention in Hillsborough in 1788. Archaeology at least nine other graves in this family plot. , When Nathaniel Jones died in 1815, a half-century before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, he directed that his twenty-nine slaves be freed. He reasoned that:

“… every humane person, be his colour what it may, is entitled to freedom … my conscience, the (great) Criterion, condemns me for keeping them in slavery … I wish to die with a clear conscience that I may not be ashamed to appear before my master in the future world.”

In 2010 the Town and the Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel placed a new engraved stone on the box tomb of Rachel Perry Jones, and installed markers for other family members. Family history indicates those interred are: , . Nathaniel Jones (1749-1815) , . Millicent Blanchard Jones (1754-1785), first wife, bore 7 children; died in childbirth , . Robert Jones (1773-1780), first child , . Evan Jones (1778-1780), fourth child , . Rachel Perry Jones (1766-1847), second wife, bore 9 children , . Alfred Jones (1789-1865), ninth child , . Burwell Perry Jones (1791-1835), tenth child , . Timothy Walton Jones (1793-1827), eleventh child , . Wesley Jones (1794-ca. 1865), twelfth child, father of Alfred Daniel "Buck" Jones, U.S. Consul General to China , . Martha Jones Courts (1802-ca. 1861), fifteenth child , [Captions (left to right)] , . White Plains Manor House. By 1811 Nathaniel Jones amassed over 10,000 acres, the eastern part of today's Cary. Known as Nathaniel Jones of White Plains for his cotton plantation, his home stood about a mile from here at Walnut Street and Greenwood Circle until the 1950s. , . (No caption; photo is of men picking cotton) North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , . As years passed, the cemetery suffered from neglect. In 1971 Jones descendants found the 15-foot obelisk leaning precariously and the box tomb of Nathan's second wife, Rachel Perry Jones, scattered. The Cary Historical Society had work done to stabilize the obelisk and reassemble the box tomb, adding a temporary stone slab. A new iron fence was erected outside the original fence line. The developer of Maynard Oaks deeded this site to the Town in 1989. North Carolina State Archives