This page was set up in August 2007 using information kindly shared by John M. Winston.
Click to return to the Sewall 1908 Book.
John Jones Winston was born in Buckingham
County, Virginia on May 31, 1785, the second son of Captain Anthony Winston,
III and Keziah Walker Jones. The extended family migrated (to claim
Anthony Winston's bounty land from his service in the Revolutionary War)
from the family plantation, Hunting Towers, near New Store, Buckingham
County, Virginia to Wilson County, Tennessee in late 1801.
The migration included Anthony's brothers William and Isaac, and his brothers-in-law
Joel,
John, and Arthur Jones, and their families, household
goods, and slaves. The wagon train had to be enormous.
The family lived near Lebanon, Wilson
County, Tennessee until they moved
to Nashville (Davidson County) in about 1804 to a plantation
next to the Hermitage. John Jones Winston married his first cousin
Mary Walker "Polly" Jones in Williamson County, Tennessee on January 17,
1807.
John Jones Winston and Polly Jones Winston had the following children:
The family next migrated to Huntsville,
Alabama in 1811. They continued to engage in land speculation and
commerce until the War of 1812. Responding to the request of General Jackson,
Anthony Winston III helped raise a company of cavalry. John Jones
Winston was elected Captain, while his older brother Anthony Winston IV
served as Lieutenant and Isaac Winston served as First Sergeant; other
younger brothers served in the Company as well. They were attached
to the Second Tennessee Regiment of Volunteer Mounted Gunmen under Colonel
John Coffee as Winston's Company from Madison County (note: the term "Mounted
Gunmen" was to distinguish them from "Lancers"). The company fought
in
the Battles of Tallushatchee, Talladega, and Horseshoe
Bend (where John was wounded), and later the Battle of New Orleans, defending
General Jackson's exposed left flank.
After the War of 1812 ended and John returned to Huntsville, the Indian Cession left millions of acres open to settlement and speculation, and speculate he did, acquiring thousands of acres that are recorded with the Bureau of Land Management. After General John Coffee surveyed and laid out the City of Big Springs, now Tuscumbia, the Winston family migrated there in 1817.
Polly Winston died in about 1819, and John Jones Winston was left with four children and in need of a wife. He met and married the daughter of Randall Johnston, a lawyer originally from Duplin, NC, 19-year old Susan Johnston. They were married on April 20, 1820 in Nashville, Tennessee.
John Jones Winston and Susan Johnston Winston had the following children:
Susan Winston was listed as a founding
member of the First Presbyterian Church of Tuscumbia, and was enumerated
in the 1850 census of Greene County, Alabama.
In 1833, the John Jones Winston migrated
from Franklin County to Greene County, and settled in Mount Hebron beat.
He was elected for a term to the Alabama House of Representatives (1835-36),
and was active with the Masonic Lodge.
| "We have seen a statement of
a Cotton-picking, on the farm of Col. John J. WINSTON, of this county,
which beats anything in that line we have ever recorded. We have not space
to give more than a brief abstract of the statement. THORNTON picked 428
lbs. in one day - JIM 413 lbs. - MAC and BEN, each, 387 lbs. - HENRY 378
lbs. - DAN 330 lbs. - and many others gathered quantities varying from
250 to 300 lbs. This is a picking which any of our planters may be safely
challenged to beat. The quantity gathered by 44 hands was 8,840 lbs. -
the space off of which it was gathered about six acres. It was the second
picking, an average yield of 300 lbs. per acre having been gathered before,
and about 400 or 500 lbs. per acre remaining to open. So here will be a
yield of about 1800 or 2000 lbs. per acre. This we call good cropping and
good picking.
"Beat it who can, in the county or in the State. Eutaw Whig." |
While living in Greene County he suffered the loss of his oldest son John Milton Winston, and his daughter Mary Francis Posey. Nevertheless he endured and prospered through several financial depressions by his shrewd investments and land acquisitions. He died of an apparent stroke on April 5, 1850.
His nephew, John Anthony Winston, whom some historians confuse with him, became the first native-born governor of Alabama. Most of his children migrated to Texas in 1852. Susan Winston died in Columbia, Brazoria County, Texas in 1858, and is interred in the Cedar Lake Cemetery there.
Click to contact John M. Winston, a great X2 grandson of John Jones Winston.
Click to return to the Sewall 1908 Book.