The huge scale of the adjacent ACC office building makes the Jones Victorian-style home look like a dollhouse. The house was built ca 1855, but Thomas Jones acquired it in 1866, right after the war. He purchased it from a local lawyer, Daniel Troy. Troy owned the house for only a few days prior, where he acquired it from the widow of Edward N. Grant. Jones added the second floor and a wing in the rear in 1892. Jones studied under Stonewall Jackson at VMI, and it was he that carried the flag of truce at Appomattox. He became governor of Alabama in 1890 and this house served as the Governor’s Mansion for that term. In the State Constitutional Convention of 1901, exGov Jones led opposition to the provisions which disenfranchised Blacks and other desperate attempts to mitigate lingering effects of Reconstruction (likely opposed to the Black Belt planter views of my great grandfather, Justice Thomas Coleman, who largely drafted the instrument). The Jones house was added to the National Historic Register in 1978.

Governor Jones is pictured at left. His son,  Judge Walter B Jones, who lived in the house until his death in 1966, founded the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law. In the late 1950s I attended a few classes at the school, which was conducted in a house immediately behind this one. Dr David Bronner, who as head of the RSA built the ACC building next door, was brought to Montgomery to become dean of the school when it was purchased by the U of A circa 1975. Faulkner University bought the Jones Law School a few years later.

1894 – Picture of house on an old postcard. Courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History

-Charles Humphries