The story
Welcome to Jones
Jones is the crossroads village of Newberg Township, where M-40 meets M-60 about eleven miles east of Cassopolis. It was born when the Air Line railroad came through in the early 1870s, took its name from the family on whose farm the post office stood, and for a time shipped tens of thousands of bushels of wheat a year.
Before there was a village there was a farm. Rogers says William D. Jones settled in 1835 near the spot that became the village, and over the years enlarged his farm and prospered; Mathews says he came to Michigan in 1836. Mathews says the township's first post office, on the mail route from Centreville to Niles opened in 1836, was kept for many years at farmhouses, first at R. Crego's on section 21. Wikipedia, citing Walter Romig's Michigan Place Names, gives the office's name as Newberg from August 4, 1837, and Newburgh from December 24, 1861.
The Jones farm saw one of the worst nights in the county's early history. On June 18, 1858, as William D. Jones was finishing a new brick house to replace his old log home, fire broke out in the frame kitchen about eleven o'clock at night. The two carpenters sleeping upstairs battered their way out with an axe, but Jones, following them down, was overcome by smoke at the foot of the stairs, and his invalid wife died in her room. Rogers calls it "the most terrible tragedy in the history of the Township, if not of the County." Their son Edward H. Jones, away in Elkhart that night, was summoned home by telegraph and kept the homestead on section 34.
Read the full story
Then the railroad came. The Michigan Central's Air Line was completed through the south tier of Newberg's sections in 1871, and Mathews says the first business building at the crossing was put up about that year by H. Micksel and used as a grocery and saloon. In 1870 the post office moved to E. H. Jones's house on section 34, with Jones as postmaster, and Romig records that the office took the name Jones on December 19, 1881. When Rogers wrote in 1875 the place was called Jones' Crossing. It had two general stores, a drug store, a steam sawmill, two blacksmith shops, a shoe and harness shop and two doctors, and it was said to ship 75,000 bushels of wheat a year, besides lumber and other produce.
By 1882 Mathews counted 118 people. The main street was the north and south section-line road. David Fairfield had built a general store, which burned, and a hotel, kept then by J. S. Tompkins; H. B. Doust ran a drug store, S. P. King a shoe shop, Henry Giddings the smithy, Doty and Tims the harness shop and Thomas and Long the hardware. Dr. Thomas L. Blakely, the first physician to settle in the township, practiced in the village, and the Methodists, who had first met at Poe's Corners, held their services and Sunday school in the hall at Jones. Mathews says the village "was platted by E. H. Jones, hence its name."
Jones kept growing. Glover wrote in 1906 that it had four general stores, a grocery, a shoe store, two hardware stores, a saloon, a harness and blacksmith shop and about three hundred people. Frank Dunn, then township supervisor, had been in business there since 1879, and E. H. Jones, whom Glover calls the founder of the village, was still living. Glover also records that the village plat was finally recorded on October 19, 1897, by Alonzo V. Beeman. In 1920 the Michigan Central depot was a passenger, freight and express agency shared with the American Railway Express Company, with H. H. Pierce as agent.
Today Jones is an unincorporated community at the junction of M-40 and M-60. The Newberg Township hall, the old Poe's School of 1856, stands nearby at Poe's Corners on Born Street with its Michigan historical marker.