Georgia

Jones-Ross House, Old Clinton, Georgia Georgia (33.002057, -83.564837)

Primary House Felling Dates: Winter 1825/6

Dismantled Rear Shed Felling Dates: Undated

Site Master 1739-1825 (yellow pine) JRGAx1 (t = 8.67 GEORGIA2; 6.68 AL003; 6.30 MGGAx1).

The Jones-Ross House of Old Clinton was built by Mrs. Beersheba Jones on 30 acres of land bought from Samuel and Elizabeth Cook in 1825. The value of the land, $500, suggests that no house, or at most a simple one, stood on the property when she bought it. Between 1826 and 1831 she bought more land, bringing her total to 109 acres. The land lay immediately outside the town grid of Clinton, then county seat of Jones County. She lived there with three children and 16 enslaved persons.

The house belongs to the architectural type of the I-house, in the variant widely known in Georgia as a plantation plain type: two story, central hall, single pile front block with a one-story, shed-roofed rear range of rooms. On the front stood a prominent two-story portico. The house is large and imposing and has excellent Federal-style interior woodwork. It has been attributed to the well-known Milledgeville architect-builder, Daniel Pratt, who owned a plantation near Clinton in Jones County.

After Beersheba Jones’s death in 1837, the house was owned by a series of owners. John Pitts bought it from the Jones family, and his son, Charles, served as pastor of the nearby Clinton Methodist Church. Late in the nineteenth century, Dr. George Turnbull Pursley, Francis M. Stewart, and T. M. Roberts owned it in succession. Finally, in 1916 the property was conveyed to Mrs. Fannie E. Ross, whose descendants still own it.

[with the house history and description in italics by Mark Reinberger]

Dendrochronological analysis has shown that the building was constructed from timbers felled in the winter of 1825/6.

Worthington and Seiter 2024 "The Tree-Ring Dating of the Jones-Ross House, Old Clinton, Georgia." Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory 2024/10.

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