photo: Roger Haile

Emmett Parker Jones

Art Form: Folk/Traditional Crafts and Visual Arts

Tyner, NC

 

About Emmett Parker Jones

Born in 1914, Emmett Jones grew up in Gates County, where farming was the chief occupation. His great-great grandfather, Joseph Parker, had built wheels, carts, wagons, and farm equipment for Gates County residents before the Civil War. Joseph Parker’s knowledge and skills as a wheelwright were handed down through generations of the Parker and Jones families.

Emmett’s father, Otis Jones, was well known throughout northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia as a master blacksmith and wheelwright. When carts needed mending or wagons needed new wheels, farmers came to Otis. Consequently, there was always work to be done. “All the way through school,” Jones says, “when I would get off of the bus, Daddy would stick his head out of the shop and say, ‘Get your [school] clothes off and get out here as soon as you can. I need you bad.’”

As a boy, Emmett learned the skills of blacksmithing and woodworking by watching his father’s hands, imitating his technique, and following his advice. When he was a teenager, he could think out wheel patterns and geometric systems in his head and, without written diagrams or instructions, control the entire process of creating a finished wheel from raw materials. “By the time I ever got out of high school,” he reports, “I was building wheels on my own.” Today, as he takes blocks of wood and produces a well formed hub, cuts spokes, shapes rims, and then fashions these separate pieces of wood and iron into a symmetrical “first class” wheel, Emmett Jones resembles a sculptor as much as a tradesman.

By the advent of World War II, changes in the agricultural economy and technology were rendering the wheelwright trade virtually obsolete in the farming community. For the next forty years, he adapted his skills to a variety of new occupations, such as construction welder, aircraft technician, and welding instructor.

At the urging of his wife, Marguerite, he reopened his shop and began restoring and reconstructing wagons, carts, and wheels for clients, such as the Lost Colony outdoor drama and Colonial Williamsburg. He built a mobile workshop in order to demonstrate the wheelwright trade at fairs, festivals, and craft shows across Virginia and North Carolina. More recently, he loaned his tools and wheels and provided expertise to help the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City stage a popular exhibit celebrating the rural artisan’s service to the farmer.

Emmett Jones has continued to pursue his craft by building quarter-sized “dump carts” and miniature log wagons. These models are fully functional and accurate reproductions of the vehicles that he first manufactured in his father’s shop—even down to the equipment used to harness the horses to these conveyances. By scaling down the full-sized vehicles he once used and made, he has found a way to commemorate not only a historical vehicle, but also a craft and occupation that has served his family and his community for generations.