Oxcarts lumbered along the flintrock road pulling loads of timber while dogs, chickens and children scampered in the sandy dust. Somewhere in the distance a dog howled as hogs tried to force their way into the house again. The whistle of the SCL train (“Loping Gopher”) sounded through the pine trees and the familiar call of the cowboys and the rumble of cattle approaching sent animals and children alike scurrying out of the way. “You could hear the cowboys popping their whips and yelling at the cows so close that sometimes it seemed they were going to drive the cattle right through the house,” the woman fondly recalled.
The year was 1917 and the woman is 87-year-old Mary Ethel Jones. A fifth generation Floridian, Mrs. Jones moved to Perry in February of 1917 with her husband, Thomas Nathaniel, who opened the Emporium that year at the corner of Jefferson and Main Street.
Before she married in 1909, she was a Woodberry from Gadsden County. The move was a happy one for her, “I liked Perry from the start,” she recalled. “There were some mighty fine people here, and I made a lot of friends. Perry was also better for growing flowers. “They just wouldn’t grow in that Quincy clay,” she recollected.
She remembers fondly her second day in town. “We were staying at the Graystone Hotel owned by the McCaskills, I remember looking out and seeing them place the first stakes for the Methodist Church.”
Later that year, the Jonses bought a one story house from a local lumberman. Built at the turn of the century, he had personally selected each piece of heart timber used in the house. It had a veranda that encircled the entire house and was laid down on a sand bed a foot thick. The house still stands at 414 N. Orange Street.
“The house was beautiful and cost $1,400. Mr. Hester was looking at it the same time we were and we told the owner we would give him an extra $50 over the price if we could have it,” she said.
The only thing Mrs. Jones disliked about the property was the sand bed, but she quickly remedied that. Her eldest daughter, Mary Williams, 63, explained that “She and papa put up a fence to keep the hogs and traffic out. Then they planted grass and trees and flowers. Mama planted so many trees, there wasn’t room for all of them. Over one ten year period, we got four cords of fire wood from just thinning out the trees in our yard.”
Some of the tall oaks still stand in the yard and flowering azaleas still adorn the property. At the time the family moved in, there were just three houses in the area.
Mrs. Jones recalled another incident that happened in the early years of occupancy. “W. P. Walker, a neighbor and employee of the Perry Grocery, came over and told us one day that someone was apparently stealing most of his chickens’ laying eggs. We looked underneath the playhouse and saw the entire ground was covered with egg shells. It turned out a pole cat was stealing the eggs and eating them. Cornelius (the oldest child at 66 and current manager of the Emporium) went out and shot that old cat,” Mary recollected.
Mary also distinctly remembers the old flintrock road. “They had a rock crusher that would go around crushing rock for laying streets. The streets looked nice, but you could get some of the worst stone bruises you can imagine on that type of road.” She said.
Two of the children still live in Perry, Cornelius and Geneva Greve. The other daughters are Catherine Maxwell of Atlanta, Ga. and Jessie Inman of Bainbridge, Ga.
Mary said she and her older brother remembered when their father put up the first show windows Perry ever had on the old store. “It was the prettiest store in town,” Mary said. Her mother added that “Perry had never had a store like ours, we really did some business in those days, except during the depression and the land boom.”
The Emporium never closed its doors. “During the depression, we had a hard time keeping the store open, but somehow we made it,” Cornelius said. He added that his father incorporated the store in 1930.
The family bought back the building on the corner of Green and Washington Street just this year (1976) and put a men’s wear store in it.
Mrs. Jones said that in 1917, Perry, with a population of 1,500, was an ideal town to open the store in. “There were so few businesses here and this was the trading center for fourteen lumber mills. There was Carbur, Salem, Athena, Rocky Creek, Springdale, Burton-Swartz. Loughridge at Boyd, Lake Bird, Shady Grove, Scanlon, Hay’s, Jena, Hinley, Melviney and Interstate,” she said with remarkably clear recollection for her age.
Mary remembers well the countryside around Perry as a girl growing up. “It was beautiful, there were virgin forests all around, the floor of the forest were covered with a mat of pine straw and long stemmed violets grew abundantly. It was the most horrible sight in the world to me when they first cut out all those pretty forests. It was so beautiful,” she concluded.