Appalachian Figures
On an election day in Perry County in the late twentieth century you could expect a knock at the door. Neighbors remember a stocky man in a sport coat or a color coordinated outfit, smiling at front porches all over the hills around Hazard. He introduced himself simply as Chester Jones and tried to make it to every house in the county, enough that his slogan became “the man who came to your front door.”
For more than two decades he was the face of the Perry County Circuit Court Clerk’s office, the person you saw when you needed court papers or a driver’s license. Before that he had been a teacher and basketball coach in the county schools and, briefly, a state legislator in Frankfort. Late in life he ran pizza and frozen yogurt shops where people called him “the pizza man.”
His story also carries a harder edge. In the 2000s Jones and former judge executive Sherman Neace became central figures in a federal vote buying case that drew national attention as an example of Appalachian election fraud.
Putting his life together from obituaries, court opinions, and election records gives a picture of a man who moved easily between school gyms, courthouse corridors, and front porch politics in Hazard and Lost Creek, and whose career captures both the promise and the pitfalls of local power in the Kentucky mountains.
Lost Creek Roots And A Basketball Path
Chester Jones was born in Perry County on 27 April 1944, the son of Ashford and Mable Rye Jones.
Family cemetery records and his obituary place his home ground at Lost Creek, an upland community east of Hazard where his relatives maintained a private burial ground now known as the Jones Family Cemetery.
On early twentieth century maps of Perry County, Lost Creek appears as one of many small settlements threaded along narrow river branches and hollows that feed toward Hazard. A 1911 Rand McNally county map shows the county seat tucked along the North Fork of the Kentucky River, with roads and creeks carrying names like Grapevine, Viper, and Chavies, a geography of steep hills and scattered farmsteads that shaped Jones’s world half a century later.
Jones graduated from M. C. Napier High School in Hazard in 1963, remembered locally as a basketball player before he was ever a politician.
The obituary supplied by Engle Bowling Funeral Home and republished through Legacy notes that he went on to Sue Bennett College, where he played basketball, and attended Union College as well.
Like many mountain students of his generation he turned that experience into a local teaching career, working as a teacher and basketball coach at Combs Elementary School and later as a teacher at his old school, M. C. Napier.
In local memory he was “Coach Jones” before he was “the man who came to your front door.” Facebook photographs of M. C. Napier basketball lineups from the 1970s and neighboring obituaries for teammates confirm that he was part of the county’s small but passionate high school basketball world, a social network that overlapped heavily with school politics and courthouse campaigns.
Two Years In Frankfort
In the early 1970s Jones followed a familiar Appalachian route from schoolhouse to statehouse. Running as a Democrat, he sought a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives from the 91st District, which then covered Perry County and part of the surrounding region. Contemporary election coverage in the Louisville Courier Journal reported his 1971 campaign, and official summaries list him as winning the race and taking his seat in January 1972.
Reference works on Kentucky legislative membership, compiled by the Legislative Research Commission, list “Jones, Chester” as a Democratic member of the House from District 91 during the 1972 to 1974 term.
His time in Frankfort was brief. In the 1973 Democratic primary he faced businessman Hoover Dawahare. Courier Journal reports and later biographical entries on Dawahare agree that Dawahare defeated Jones and went on to hold the seat.
Those two years placed Jones in the wave of local educators and courthouse men who carried rural Democratic politics at the end of the twentieth century. He returned home without higher office, but not without contacts and experience that would matter in his next campaigns.
The Courthouse Clerk Who Came To Your Door
In 1975 Perry County voters chose a new Circuit Court Clerk. Election records and later news coverage agree that Jones won the race and took office the following January.
The job carried responsibility for court dockets, records, and licensing, and it placed him in the heart of downtown Hazard. Photographs from the era show a mid century brick courthouse with tall columns and a modern judicial center rising beside it in the early 2000s, the buildings where Jones spent much of his working life.
Attorney General opinions from 1980 and 1995 help pin down his tenure. In 1980 an official opinion cited “Mr. Chester Jones, Perry Circuit Court Clerk, Box 743, Hazard, Kentucky 41701” as the requesting party.
Fifteen years later an open records decision in a dispute over district court documents noted that copies of the decision were mailed to “Chester Jones, Perry County Circuit Court Clerk, P. O. Box 743, Hazard, Ky 41701.”
Together with the WYMT obituary and Wikipedia entry, these documents confirm that he held the clerkship from the mid 1970s until about 2000, a quarter century of continuous local office.
Jones’s style as clerk blurred the line between administration and old fashioned retail politics. WYMT’s 2016 remembrance describes his habit of trying to visit every home in Perry County in each election and credits him with the slogan “the man who came to your front door.”
He also served as chair of the Perry County Democratic Party executive committee, a position confirmed in federal court records and news reports about his later legal troubles.
Campaigns, Pizza, And The Local Party
Stepping away from the clerk’s office in 2000 did not mean stepping out of politics. Ballotpedia’s compilation of Kentucky House races shows Jones appearing again in the Democratic primary for House District 84 in 2008, a four way contest that he lost to Fitz Steele, a reminder of his ongoing desire to return to Frankfort.
Around the same time he remained active in party circles. Federal appellate judges later described him as the chair of the Perry County Democratic Party executive committee during the 2008 election cycle, working closely with former judge executive Sherman Neace, who was seeking a magistrate’s seat.
Meanwhile he was becoming known to a new generation not from campaign cards but from pizza boxes and frozen yogurt cups. WYMT’s obituary notes that in later years he operated King’s Pizza and Fro Jo’s self serve frozen yogurt at a shopping center address in Hazard, earning the nickname “the pizza man.”
Local business directory entries for Fro Jo’s Frozen Yogurt and King’s Pizza place both businesses at or near 242 Village Lane in Hazard, reinforcing the link between Jones’s name and the small food court many families remember.
In that sense his story looks like many Appalachian courthouse stories. A man rooted in the public schools and county politics shifts into small business while keeping one foot in campaigns and party work.
Vote Buying And A Federal Case
The part that sets his story apart from most of his peers is the federal mail fraud case that grew out of the 2008 local elections.
According to a later opinion by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the Kentucky Democratic Party provided 7,500 dollars to Perry County officials for get out the vote work in that cycle. Jones, as county party chair and a candidate for school board, and Neace, as a candidate for magistrate, took responsibility for the funds.
Trial and appellate records describe how Jones and Neace instead used this pool of money to pay about seventy five voters one hundred dollars each in exchange for their votes, then filed a false campaign finance report that concealed the payments.
Investigative reporting in the Lexington Herald Leader, summarized in open sources, traced the case from initial federal indictments through plea negotiations. In 2010 Jones pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of mail fraud tied to the false report.
The Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database and a background document prepared for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity both note that Jones received a one year prison sentence, while Neace was sentenced to three years of probation with six months of home confinement.
WYMT’s obituary reminded viewers that Jones continued to insist he had not knowingly broken the law, even as he lived with the consequences of the conviction.
For scholars of Appalachian politics the case fits into a much longer history of coercion and vote buying in eastern Kentucky elections, stretching back into the nineteenth century. What makes the Jones and Neace case distinctive is the way it was documented in federal court records and then reused in national debates about voter fraud, often stripped of the local context of party rivalries, economic hardship, and the long tradition of personal vote chasing in mountain counties.
Illness, Death, And Memory
In early April 2016 news outlets in Hazard reported that “former long time Perry County Circuit Court Clerk Chester Jones is dead,” noting that he had cancer and died at a hospice facility in Richmond at age seventy one.
The Engle Bowling Funeral Home obituary gives his dates as 27 April 1944 to 7 April 2016, lists his parents and extended family, and records that he was buried at the Jones Family Cemetery at Lost Creek.
Those notices and later online tributes tend to remember him not first as a defendant in a vote buying case but as a coach, teacher, clerk, and businessman who helped many families navigate school sports, court paperwork, and the small pleasures of pizza and frozen yogurt.
A local school board campaign page, posted after his death, recalled the way he dressed in different colors on different days of the campaign trail, a small flourish in a political culture that often leans on humor and spectacle to soften hard choices.
At the same time, the persistence of the Jones and Neace case in national voter fraud compilations ensures that his name appears whenever people look for historical examples of election misconduct in Kentucky.
This tension between local memory and national narrative is part of why his story belongs among Appalachian figures. It reminds us that the same person can be remembered as a neighborly clerk and as a cautionary case, and that rural political life in the late twentieth century often blurred the line between neighborly favors, machine politics, and federal criminal law.
Chester Jones And Mountain Politics
Reading across the surviving sources, Jones’s life sketches several patterns that recur in modern Appalachian political history.
He moved from local schools into public office, part of a cadre of teacher politicians whose classroom reputations provided a springboard into the courthouse and the statehouse. His short stint in the Kentucky House in the early 1970s reflects a moment when Democratic dominance in eastern Kentucky made the real contest the primary rather than the general election, and when local businessmen like Hoover Dawahare could unseat incumbents through intra party challenges.
His long tenure as circuit clerk lines up with broader trends in which courthouse offices in rural Kentucky became semi hereditary, passed among a small circle of families and political allies, often with little effective competition. The open records opinions addressed to him are small paper traces of an office that was otherwise built on face to face interactions at the counter and on doorsteps.
His later business ventures speak to the way former officeholders in small counties often shift into local entrepreneurship, turning their name recognition into economic capital as well as political capital. King’s Pizza and Fro Jo’s became informal gathering places where people talked about county races, road conditions, and school issues over slices and frozen yogurt.
Finally, the vote buying case shows how local campaign practices that once passed as normal or at least as tolerated could collide with tightened federal enforcement. Paying for votes had long been illegal, but in some mountain communities small cash gifts or favors around election time survived as a custom older people remembered from courthouse rings in the early twentieth century. Jones’s plea in the 2010 mail fraud case did not invent that culture, but it did put a modern face on it at a moment when national debates about voter fraud were intensifying.
In the end, the man buried on the hill at Lost Creek leaves behind a story in which school gyms, courthouse steps, and front porches all matter. For anyone trying to understand how local power has worked in eastern Kentucky during the past fifty years, his life offers a reminder that the line between community service and abuse of political trust can be thin, and that historians have to hold both sides of that line in view.
Sources & Further Reading
Engle Bowling Funeral Home obituary for Chester Jones, Hazard, Kentucky, reproduced via Legacy.com. Primary biographical notice with birth and death dates, family information, education, and offices held, along with burial details for the Jones Family Cemetery at Lost Creek. Legacy+2Legacy+2
“Well known Perry County politician, businessman dies,” WYMT TV, 8 April 2016. Contemporary news obituary that summarizes Jones’s clerkship, teaching and coaching career, business ventures, and conviction in the vote fraud case, including the “man who came to your front door” slogan. https://www.wymt.com
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, Kentucky General Assembly Membership 1900 to 2005, Informational Bulletin 175. Official membership directory that records Jones’s service as a Democratic representative for District 91 in the early 1970s. Legislature Kentucky+2Legislature Kentucky+2
Kentucky Attorney General, OAG 80 646 and Open Records Decision 95 ORD 094. Primary administrative sources that identify “Chester Jones, Perry Circuit Court Clerk” and “Chester Jones, Perry County Circuit Court Clerk” with a Hazard mailing address, confirming his long tenure in that office. Kyopengov+1
“United States v. Chester Jones,” No. 10 5598, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (2011). Federal appellate opinion detailing the 2008 Perry County vote buying scheme involving Jones and Sherman Neace, their misuse of party funds, and the mail fraud conviction. Justia Law
“Chester Jones and Sherman Neace,” Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database; and “A Sampling of Election Fraud Cases from Across the Country,” background document prepared for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Secondary compilations summarizing the vote buying case and sentencing, based on court and news records. The Heritage Foundation+1
“Kentucky House of Representatives elections, 2008” and “Kentucky House of Representatives elections, 2002,” Ballotpedia. Compiled election returns that document Jones’s later campaigns for House District 84 and their outcomes. Ballotpedia+1
“Chester Jones,” Wikipedia entry, drawing in part on The Courier Journal’s “The Legislature” and “Dawahare wins” articles. Useful tertiary summary of his early life, teaching and coaching career, and legislative service, cross checked against primary sources. Wikipedia