JoCoYo

There is a bronze soldier standing on the courthouse lawn in Smithfield. He has been there since 1926. He stands at parade rest — chin up, eyes forward — with the posture of a man who doesn't yet know what's waiting for him.On the stone beneath his feet: forty-seven names.Buck Hill. Pearlie H. Harris. Maudius Godwin. Charlie Wall.Tobacco farmers. Mill workers. Farm boys from Four Oaks and Kenly and the banks of the Little River. They went to France. They did not come home.

In 1920, a woman in Smithfield sat down and made a decision.Her husband had just died. He'd been the editor of the Smithfield Herald. She had children, half-ownership of a newspaper she'd never run, and a list of things a widow in Johnston County in 1920 was expected to do.She walked into the office and started editing the paper instead.When people asked why, she had an answer ready: she was keeping it for her boys.That's what she said. Here's what she actually did — she ran the paper for thirteen years, won the first journalism award the North Carolina Press Association ever gave, wrote a column that ran for thirty years, and helped build the Johnston County public library.While telling everyone she was just holding it together in the meantime.

I teach in rural Johnston County. And when I look out at my classroom, I see kids whose great-grandparents farmed this land — and kids whose parents crossed an international border to get here. Families who've been in these communities for two hundred years, sitting next to families who arrived within the last twenty.Nobody has really sat down and told that story out loud.So today we're going to talk about chickens. What they became. Who came because of them. And who was already here when they arrived.#immigration #chicken #agriculture

At the turn of the twentieth century, Selma, North Carolina was the biggest town in Johnston County. Bigger than Smithfield. The county seat. A town that had existed since 1777.Selma beat it — in thirty-three years — starting from a railroad station and a grid of lots.Then a beetle crossed the Rio Grande. And cotton prices fell to five cents a pound. And three mills closed. And by 1992, there were twenty-five empty buildings on Raiford Street, and a town manager who couldn't sleep.What do you do when the thing that made you is gone?

Gertrude Weil defied NC's 1920 "NO" on women's votes—mailed fire to an unknown Smithfield ally: "THINK RATIFICATION. Make us the PERFECT 36th!" Goldsboro's Jewish firebrand swam first into segregated pools at 80, battled 50 years unbowed. State caved 51 years late. She died 24 days after. Who in JoCo answered her call?

From Reconstruction to 1969—a 92-year silence in Johnston County's official history. Were there really no Black elected officials in between? Dive into the Fusion era's lost Black leaders, the Red Shirts' terror, and the laws that erased them from the record. JoCoYo uncovers the deliberate deletion of local Black political power.

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.

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.

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.