Jack P. “Jake” Hutchings, Stone Mason and State Legislator

Jacob P. “Jake” Hutchings (c. March 1831-June 1909) was born in slavery in Virginia. He was sold in 1842 to Alfred George of Jones County, Georgia, and then soon owned by Richard Henry Hutchings (c. 1817-74), whose granite quarry near Clinton occupied an area now known as Jake’s Woods. 

After Emancipation, he taught himself how to read and write, served as a teacher and minister (many Black churches doubled as schools), and purchased the quarry where he once had been enslaved.  Tall and impeccably dressed, he was regarded as polite, strong, courageous, determined, and respectable.  His white ancestry (was he the son of his enslaver?) may have helped him secure credit to open a short-lived grocery store and, as the 1870 census reports, purchase $1500 worth of farmland and real estate.

Jake became the main mason serving the county, often called upon to cut headstones for the deceased. His work included the stone for the walls of Clinton’s courthouse and jail and stone on the grounds around the Jones County courthouse in Gray.

Sources

“About Jones County Cemeteries.”  Fields of Stone: Cemeteries of Jones County, Georgia.

http://www.friendsofcems.org/jones/default1.htm?AboutJonesCem.htm,2.

Daily Intelligencer (Atlanta, GA), January 28, 1870, p. 50.  Georgia Historic Newspapers.

US Census, 1870.