Appalachian Figures
In the early 1980s, readers of the Whitley Republican opened their weekly paper to find a new feature tucked in among courthouse news and local advertisements. The column carried a plain but evocative title: “Legend and Lore of Whitley County.” Its author signed himself simply as Judge Pleas Jones, a retired jurist from Williamsburg who had spent decades on county benches and, finally, on Kentucky’s highest court.
On the surface, the series was a run of local sketches about early settlers, court cases, and family stories. Beneath that surface was something more unusual. Here was a man who had helped design modern Kentucky bail law and interpret strip mining statutes turning in his retirement to the same nineteenth century court minutes that had once been raw material for his work as a lawyer. In one life he wrote majority opinions that reshaped criminal procedure. In another he combed old Whitley County records for clues to a Cox family puzzle stretching back to a will probated in London in 1711.
Taken together, the court opinions and the hometown column give us a rare double portrait. Pleas E. Jones was not just a mountain lawyer who “made it” to the Supreme Court in Frankfort. He was also part of a long chain of Whitley County Joneses and Pleasant or “Pleas” namesakes who carried local memory forward into the late twentieth century.
Whitley County roots
Judge Jones began life a long way from the state capitol. He was born on a farm in Whitley County on December 23, 1912, the son of Nathaniel “Thanny” Benton Jones and Rachel Lovanna Lundy. FamilySearch’s compiled profile for “Judge Pleas E Jones” pins his birth to Whitley County that winter and notes that his parents had married earlier that year, both still in their early twenties.
During the 1920s the family moved to Harlan County, where the boy earned money delivering The Cincinnati Postaround the coal camp of Bardo before returning to Whitley County. After graduating from Williamsburg High School he attended Cumberland College, then a junior college and now the University of the Cumberlands, before finishing education degrees at Union College and Eastern State Teachers College.
Like many ambitious young men in southeastern Kentucky, Jones first stepped into public life as a schoolteacher. By the late 1930s he had shifted from classrooms to courthouse halls. The Lexington obituary that later anchored his Wikipedia biography traces his rise from county clerk in 1939 to county judge in 1953, then to commonwealth’s attorney for the Thirty Fourth Judicial District in 1959 and circuit judge in 1963. The City of Williamsburg’s history page, drawing on Whitley County, Kentucky: History and Families, 1818–1993 and a centennial issue of the Whitley News-Journal, lists him as Whitley County judge from 1953 through 1957, one name in a line of officeholders that stretches back to the county’s creation in 1818.
War service and church work rounded out the picture. Jones served in the United States Army during the Second World War, then returned to Kentucky to study law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. At home in Williamsburg he was a Sunday school teacher and treasurer at Main Street Baptist Church and a familiar face in local civic organizations like the American Legion, Lions, Rotary, Masons, Shriners, and the Sons of the American Revolution.
From Williamsburg courthouse to Kentucky’s high court
The 1960s and 1970s carried Pleas Jones well beyond Whitley County, even as he insisted on remaining rooted there. In 1973, Democratic governor Wendell H. Ford appointed him to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, then the state’s court of last resort, filling a vacancy left by the death of Homer Neikirk. The appointment came with political cost. Upset that one of their own had accepted a post from a Democratic governor, Kentucky Republicans chose another candidate to run for the remainder of the term. Jones ran as an independent and, according to later summaries, won the special election by roughly seventy five hundred votes.
A 1976 constitutional amendment reorganized Kentucky’s judiciary. The old Court of Appeals became the Supreme Court of Kentucky, with a new intermediate Court of Appeals created below it. The Administrative Office of the Courts’ mid 1970s annual report lists “Justice Pleas Jones, Third Supreme Court District, Williamsburg, Kentucky” among the new court’s members, underscoring how unusual it was to have a justice whose home address still read like a small town return.
On the high court he often served as acting chief justice when Chief Justice John S. Palmore was absent, and later accounts note that Jones became the first justice to retire from the newly formed Supreme Court in 1979. Yet even as he handled criminal appeals and constitutional challenges, his life looked more like that of a circuit-riding nineteenth century judge than a modern big-city jurist.
That rhythm appears clearly in a federal tax case that briefly turned the judge himself into a litigant. In Pleas Jones and Marie Jones v. United States the Sixth Circuit considered whether two justices of Kentucky’s highest court, including Jones, could deduct the cost of maintaining two homes and commuting between them. The opinion explains that the Kentucky constitution required appellate judges to reside in their election districts while the day-to-day work of the court took place in Frankfort. Jones and his colleague therefore kept homes in both places and traveled between them during the 1974 tax year.
The judges lost the deduction, but the case gives modern readers a rare glimpse of life behind the official biographies. It shows a Whitley County man who never stopped being from Whitley County, even while he sat on a court that met across the state.
“Legend and Lore of Whitley County”
After his retirement, Jones turned more deliberately toward local history. On January 14, 1984 he wrote from his Williamsburg law office to genealogist Mary Alice Cox Maples, answering her questions about a new series he had been publishing in the Whitley Republican. The surviving letter, preserved in the Brandywine Crucible genealogical archives, runs on letterhead that still reads “Pleas Jones, Attorney at Law, Williamsburg, Ky.”
In that letter Jones explains that the “Legend and Lore of Whitley County” articles rested on the earliest available Whitley County court records, though he admitted that he sometimes interpolated likely conversations or actions to make dry minutes more readable. He told Maples that the series began in October 1983 and had appeared weekly, with only two gaps, and he carefully listed the dates of the first installments in the fall of that year.
The letter also reveals why at least one genealogical society later indexed Jones’s writing as a Cox family source. Responding to Maples’s questions about Samuel Cox of early Whitley County, Jones sketched a Cox line that started with Thomas Cox, whose will he noted had been probated in London in 1711, and ran forward through Samuel Cox I and Samuel Cox II into frontier Kentucky. He added, with dry humor, that he was “not a genealogist,” only a lawyer sorting through a puzzle of names, dates, and court minutes.
Pieces of the “Legend and Lore” series ended up far from Williamsburg. The Cox Family Papers at the Briscoe Center for American History in Texas list an item titled “Legend and Lore of Whitley Co.” by Pleas Jones, accompanied by related correspondence. Berea College’s finding aid for the Chester R. Young Papers describes a folder labeled “Whitley Co. history series by Judge Pleas Jones, circa 1983–1984,” filed among a historian’s notes and clippings for use in regional research.
These archival traces confirm that Jones’s weekly column did more than entertain local readers. It fed genealogical projects in Texas, county history work at Berea, and whatever notes Chester Young was gathering about Whitley’s past. It also shows how Jones approached history the same way he approached law: start with the record, then use imagination to pull a narrative out of terse minutes and scattered entries.
Cases that changed Kentucky
If “Legend and Lore” shows the retired judge as a storyteller at ease in county records, his published opinions show how he handled the equally old but more formal records of the law. Among those opinions, one stands out.
In Stephens v. Bonding Association of Kentucky the Supreme Court upheld House Bill 254, a statute that effectively abolished commercial bail bonding in Kentucky. Modern summaries note that Justice Pleas Jones wrote the unanimous opinion, which has become a touchstone in bail reform debates.
A 2001 retrospective in The Advocate, the magazine of Kentucky’s Department of Public Advocacy, reprinted part of Jones’s language. The article highlights how he described the legislature’s decision to cut off commercial bail bonding as severing “the life sustaining cord” that kept the industry alive and letting it, in his words, “die on the vine.” In the same passage he remarked that commercial surety companies would instead go “gently into that good night,” a wry echo of Dylan Thomas placed in the middle of a serious constitutional analysis.
The opinion is not just colorful prose. It carefully walks through the legislature’s authority to reform the bail system under both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Kentucky constitution, and, as the 2001 article notes, it has been cited for decades in arguments about pretrial release, public safety, and the limits of for profit bail.
Another opinion that still echoes in Kentucky law did not carry the weight of the court but instead came in dissent. In Commonwealth v. Bradley the Supreme Court considered the powers and status of Kentucky constables. Jones dissented, and a 2025 Court of Appeals decision on constables quoted his concise summary that a constable “is charged with duties assigned to him by local law or by statute.” Behind that short sentence lies a longer historical argument about how old local offices change over time as the legislature and counties rewrite their responsibilities.
Newspaper coverage from the Floyd County Times in the mid 1970s and late 1970s shows Jones in other roles as well. In one issue the paper reported that “Justice Pleas Jones, of Whitley County, agreed” with a colleague in limiting a no-strike order involving miners and labor disputes. Another issue, celebrating Economic Development Administration funding, noted that “Justice Pleas Jones wrote for the court” in a case that shaped local development.
Taken together, the opinions and the coverage sketch a judge who was not afraid to write in plain language, who knew how county level decisions rippled into state policy, and who brought a historian’s memory of older institutions to bear on modern conflicts.
Reputation at home and in Washington
By the time he reached the state’s highest court, Pleas Jones was already a well-known figure in Whitley and neighboring counties. He chaired the Republican Party in the Fifth Congressional District, served as a delegate to the 1968 Republican National Convention, and backed Nelson Rockefeller for president when party winds were blowing toward Richard Nixon.
That independence may have cost him a federal judgeship. Later articles summarized a story that Kentucky’s Republican senators recommended him for a federal district court seat, only to see the Nixon administration decline to nominate him, allegedly because he had not supported the president in 1968.
Even without a federal robe, his reputation reached into national records. During the Watergate era a Kentucky congressman described him on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as “Circuit Judge Pleas Jones, a renowned jurist from Williamsburg, Ky.,” using his comments about the scandal as part of a broader analogy. The phrase “renowned jurist” makes a striking contrast with the small-town letterhead that appears on his 1984 note to Mary Alice Maples.
At home his family and neighbors remembered him less as an abstraction and more as a presence. Later pieces in the Corbin News-Journal by his children, Pleas David and Patricia, described his “deep and enduring footprints” in Whitley County, mixing anecdotes about his love of teaching with reflections on his work as judge, church leader, and mentor to younger lawyers.
Jones died at his home in Williamsburg in September 1986, aged seventy three, after a struggle with cancer. Contemporary coverage and later summaries differ by a day on whether he died on the nineteenth or early on the twentieth, a reminder that even recent history can blur at the edges.
Pleas, Pleasant, and the Joneses of Lower Regions
In southwestern Kentucky and across the Appalachian South, given names often carry history inside them. The older English name “Pleasant” shortened into “Pleas” turns up repeatedly in Whitley County records, and it is no surprise that Judge Jones’s own given name puzzled outsiders long before it turned up in legal citations.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century census records, as compiled on sites like WeRelate and FamilySearch, trace at least one earlier Pleasant Jones line anchored in Lower Regions precinct, southeast of Williamsburg. A profile for Pleasant Jones born on December 22, 1856 in Whitley County places him as a farmer who appeared in the 1870 census at age thirteen, in the 1880 census at age twenty three in District 111, Lower Regions, and again in the 1920 census at age sixty three, still in Lower Regions. He died in 1934 and is listed as buried at Red Bird Cemetery near Williamsburg.
Related compiled trees connect this Pleasant to a broader Jones clan that includes Ambrose Madison Jones and Moses Bennett Jones, with branches stretching through Whitley County cemeteries like Pleasant Hill and Canadatown. USGenWeb cemetery transcripts and local tombstone listings confirm that some of these Joneses lie in family plots along Roses Creek and other hollows.
Whether the twentieth century judge can be firmly tied to this particular Pleasant Jones line is a question for genealogists willing to work through deed books, marriage bonds, and complete census images. The compiled FamilySearch entry for Judge Pleas E. Jones names his parents as Nathaniel Benton Jones and Rachel Lovanna Lundy, and those names in turn link to yet older Jones and Lundy families in Whitley and Harlan Counties.
What matters for local history is that the name itself persisted. By the time Judge Jones was signing opinions and letters with the short form Pleas, he was drawing on a naming tradition that had already run through at least one earlier Pleasant and a tangle of Jones cousins buried in Whitley soil. His own legal and historical work, in turn, made “Pleas Jones” a name that appears today not only in genealogical charts but also in law reviews, court reports, and congressional speeches.
Tracing Judge Jones in the archives
For researchers and descendants today, Pleas E. Jones sits at the crossroads of several kinds of sources.
On the legal side his published opinions in the Kentucky Reports and South Western Reporter, especially Stephens v. Bonding Association of Kentucky and his dissent in Commonwealth v. Bradley, remain the clearest record of his judicial voice. Modern summaries in legal advocacy publications preserve some of his more vivid sentences and set them in the context of bail reform and debates over local offices.
On the local history side, the “Legend and Lore of Whitley County” series survives in scattered clippings, genealogical reprints, and the notes of other historians. The Brandywine Crucible letter to Mary Alice Cox Maples anchors the series in time and method, while the Cox Family Papers at the Briscoe Center and the Chester R. Young Papers at Berea College point to where at least some of the columns can still be read on paper. Microfilmed back issues of the Whitley Republican and the Whitley News-Journal at the Whitley County Public Library and the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives will likely yield a more complete run.
For biographical details, the 1986 obituary by Jennifer Hewlett in the Lexington Herald-Leader and later reflections by Pleas David Jones and Patricia Jones in the News-Journal supply the anecdotes and assessments that do not appear in official reports. These pieces informed the compact Wikipedia biography that so many later readers encounter first.
Finally, genealogical sites and vital records indexes provide the scaffolding needed to place Judge Jones and his namesakes in the wider Jones and Lundy families of Whitley County. Census entries, World War II draft cards, Social Security indexes, and cemetery records all lie behind the brief FamilySearch profiles that first surface his parents’ names and his 1912 birth date.
For Appalachian historians, Jones’s life and work show how the history of law and the history of place can converge in one person. His majority opinions and his “Legend and Lore” sketches both begin with old records and end in stories about what it meant to live under a particular set of rules in a particular corner of the Cumberland foothills.
Why Pleas E. Jones belongs in Appalachian history
It would be easy to treat Pleas E. Jones as a figure of purely institutional history. He was, after all, a Supreme Court justice, a county judge, a commonwealth’s attorney, and a party chair. His name appears in law books and annual reports.
But the surviving sources suggest a more layered Appalachian story. He was a Whitley County farm boy who carried newspapers in a Harlan coal camp and then returned home to teach school, run for courthouse offices, and serve in a small-town Baptist church. He spent years driving back and forth between Williamsburg and Frankfort because the state’s constitution required judges to live in the districts whose people they served. In retirement he sat down with the same court minutes he had once cited in legal arguments and turned them into historical sketches for neighbors who already knew the names on the page.
His life also bridges two ways of remembering Appalachia. In “Legend and Lore” he treats local tradition and official records as pieces of a puzzle, not rivals. In Stephens and Bradley he does much the same thing with statutes and constitutional provisions, reading them in light of older practices and the lived realities of counties that still relied on constables, jailers, and commercial bondsmen.
For researchers following the many Pleases and Pleasants who dot Whitley County’s genealogical landscape, Judge Jones is both a subject and a guide. His letter to Mary Alice Cox Maples shows him wrestling with Samuel Cox’s descendants much as later genealogists wrestle with the Joneses of Lower Regions. His history column and his court opinions invite us to treat rural legal records not just as sources for lawsuits but as the backbone of local storytelling.
In that sense, Pleas E. Jones belongs securely on the same shelf as the singers, preachers, and community chroniclers who make up the heart of Appalachian history. His legacy is written in law books and in yellowing newsprint, but it is also written in the habits of Whitley Countians who still turn to courthouse minutes, cemetery lists, and family letters when they want to understand how their corner of the mountains came to be.
Sources & Further Reading
Pleas Jones to Mary Alice Cox Maples, January 14, 1984, “Jones, Pleas Letter,” Brandywine Crucible archives, discussing the “Legend and Lore of Whitley County” series, its reliance on early court records, and Cox family genealogy.brandywinecrucible.org+1
“Whitley Co. history series by Judge Pleas Jones, circa 1983–1984,” Chester R. Young Papers, Berea College Special Collections and Archives, and “Article, ‘Legend and Lore of Whitley Co.’ by Pleas Jones,” Cox Family Papers, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.bereaarchives.libraryhost.com+1
Stephens v. Bonding Association of Kentucky, 538 S.W.2d 580 (Ky. 1976), opinion of the court by Justice Pleas Jones, and Commonwealth v. Bradley, 516 S.W.2d 644 (Ky. 1974), Jones, J., dissenting, as quoted and discussed in The Advocate, Vol. 23, No. 5 (September 2001) and later Kentucky appellate opinions on constables.Department of Public Advocacy+2Justia Law+2
Pleas Jones and Marie Jones v. United States, 648 F.2d 1081 (6th Cir. 1981), describing the constitutional requirement that Kentucky appellate judges reside in their election districts and the resulting need to maintain homes in both district and capital.Justia Law
Jennifer Hewlett, “Ex-Justice Pleas Jones Dies at 73 in Whitley,” Lexington Herald-Leader, September 20, 1986; Tom Frazier, “Jones, Retired Supreme Court Justice, Does As He Pleases,” McCreary County Record, June 26, 1979; Pleas David Jones, “Letter to the Editor,” News-Journal (Corbin), February 13, 2013; and Patricia Jones, “Deep and enduring footprints,” News-Journal, April 29, 2015. These articles underpin the biographical summary in the “Pleas Jones” entry on English Wikipedia.Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
Annual Report, Administrative Office of the Courts, Kentucky Court of Justice, mid 1970s, listing “Justice Pleas Jones – Third Supreme Court District – Williamsburg, Kentucky”; City of Williamsburg, “History of Williamsburg,” which credits Whitley County, Kentucky: History and Families, 1818–1993 and the Whitley News-Journal 100th edition for its roster of county judges.Office of Justice Programs+1
WeRelate and FamilySearch compiled profiles for Pleasant Jones (b. 1856, Whitley County, d. 1934, buried at Red Bird Cemetery) and for Judge Pleas E. Jones (b. 1912, Whitley County, son of Nathaniel Benton Jones and Rachel Lovanna Lundy), supported by USGenWeb Whitley County cemetery transcriptions and related Jones family entries on Wikitree and Find A Grave.WikiTree+4WeRelate+4FamilySearch+4
Congressional Record, House of Representatives, April 30, 1973, remarks describing “Circuit Judge Pleas Jones, a renowned jurist from Williamsburg, Ky.,” during a discussion that used his comments in a broader reflection on Watergate; and mid 1970s issues of the Floyd County Times reporting Supreme Court decisions in which Justice Pleas Jones wrote for the court or concurred on labor and development disputes.GovInfo+2fclib.org+2