JoCoYo

Before the bankruptcy banners and empty storefronts, Heilig-Meyers was the furniture store that helped define small-town North Carolina. This is the story of how it started, how it grew, and why its collapse mattered far beyond the showroom

For over sixty years, Main Street in Benson was the center of the universe for Johnston County youth on a Friday night. From horse-drawn buggies in the 1930s to polished Mazda RX-7s in the 1990s, cruising wasn't just driving in circles—it was the most analog matchmaking system in the county, a ritual of belonging, and a reason for a small town to come alive. But when two thousand people start...

Every farmer is a gambler, but for sixty years, Johnston County's tobacco growers held a guaranteed winning hand. The federal quota system provided a vital safety net until 2004, when the government offered a buyout that forced every farming family into a midnight, kitchen-table decision. This episode explores the moment the agricultural rules changed in eastern North Carolina, asking who deci...

There is a bronze soldier standing on the courthouse lawn in Smithfield. He has been there since 1926. He stands at parade rest — chin up, eyes forward — with the posture of a man who doesn't yet know what's waiting for him. On the stone beneath his feet: forty-seven names. Buck Hill. Pearlie H. Harris. Maudius Godwin. Charlie Wall. Tobacco farmers. Mill workers. Farm boys from Four Oaks a...

There is a ledger in the North Carolina State Archives. Bound in leather. Column after column of names. It is titled  Johnston County Permanent Registration of Voters, 1902 to 1908. Every name in it is white. That was the point. Smith Brooks had sat on the Smithfield Board of Commissioners. Mack Sowell would sit on the Selma Town Council. Between them: ninety-two years. Two names. And everything J...

In 1920, a woman in Smithfield sat down and made a decision. Her husband had just died. He'd been the editor of the Smithfield Herald. She had children, half-ownership of a newspaper she'd never run, and a list of things a widow in Johnston County in 1920 was expected to do. She walked into the office and started editing the paper instead. When people asked why, she had an answer ready: sh...

The official history of Johnston County gives her exactly one sentence. "The first woman to hold elected office was Luma McLamb, Republican Register of Deeds from 1928 to 1932." That's it. No paragraph. No chapter. One sentence in a list of firsts. But here's what that sentence doesn't tell you: she won in a county so reliably Democratic that Republicans controlled it for exa...

I teach in rural Johnston County. And when I look out at my classroom, I see kids whose great-grandparents farmed this land — and kids whose parents crossed an international border to get here. Families who've been in these communities for two hundred years, sitting next to families who arrived within the last twenty. Nobody has really sat down and told that story out loud. So today we're...

1998. Johnston County. Republicans take control of the county commission for the first time since 1928. The firewall that had held through decades of presidential Republican waves finally breaks. Same election. Same county. Same year — Dorothy Johnson becomes the first African American ever elected to a countywide office in Johnston County's history. Two stories. Running in opposite directions...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Selma, North Carolina was the biggest town in Johnston County. Bigger than Smithfield. The county seat. A town that had existed since 1777. Selma beat it — in thirty-three years — starting from a railroad station and a grid of lots. Then a beetle crossed the Rio Grande. And cotton prices fell to five cents a pound. And three mills closed. And by 1992, there we...

There's a town in Johnston County most people know from an exit sign and a story about a possum. Four Oaks. Population around two thousand. Nice little place. But here's what the founding mythology leaves out: the man who owned the ground. His name was Isaac Evans. He was Black. His family had been free since the 1700s. And in 1886, when a railroad colonel came looking for land to build a...

Gertrude Weil defied NC's 1920 "NO" on women's votes—mailed fire to an unknown Smithfield ally: "THINK RATIFICATION. Make us the PERFECT 36th!"  Goldsboro's Jewish firebrand swam first into segregated pools at 80, battled 50 years unbowed. State caved 51 years late. She died 24 days after.  Who in JoCo answered her call?

In 1945, Sula Hansley was a girl in a city of ash and ruins. A few years later, she was a woman in a quiet, tobacco-farming town in North Carolina. This episode explores the impossible distance between Berlin’s front lines and Four Oaks’ front porches—and the incredible, untold story of a survivor who built a life in the heart of Johnston County.

From Reconstruction to 1969—a 92-year silence in Johnston County's official history. Were there really no Black elected officials in between? Dive into the Fusion era's lost Black leaders, the Red Shirts' terror, and the laws that erased them from the record. JoCoYo uncovers the deliberate deletion of local Black political power.

Why was a Canadian-born Black actor named on a school in Selma, North Carolina?  In this episode of JoCoYo, we trace the surprising story of Richard Berry Harrison, The Green Pastures, and the community that chose his name to stand for generations.

October 1912: A man steps off a train in Clayton, North Carolina, carrying a heavy secret hidden beneath fifty pounds of camera gear. He is Lewis Hine, a former schoolteacher turned investigator, sent by the National Child Labor Committee to expose the harsh reality hidden inside the town's booming cotton mill. In this episode of  JoCoYo , we pull back the curtain on a town once considered the...

In 1901, a barn dance in Selma sparked a full-blown war between a preacher, a deacon, and a fiddler. What started as a night of music and foot-stomping turned into a courthouse case, a community divide, and a story that still echoes in Johnston County history. And yes, we’ll talk about Kevin Bacon too.

John Lawson knew the Tuscarora better than almost any Englishman alive. He ate at their tables, learned their names, wrote the book that advertised their land to English settlers — and then paddled up the Neuse River to scout the next wave of encroachment. The Tuscarora stopped his canoe. They put him on trial. He lost his temper. That was the last mistake he ever made. Today on JoCoYo — the Tusca...

In 1771, Samuel Johnston handed the colonial governor the legal weapon he needed to crush a farmer uprising over taxation without representation. In 1776, Samuel Johnston led the movement for independence over — and I want you to really sit with this — taxation without representation. History is full of villains and heroes. Johnston County's founding lawyer was just... both.

Imagine writing the menu, prepping the kitchen, and getting pulled out mid-service — and then the review says the food was unremarkable. That is, more or less, what history did to James Iredell Junior. Governor, Senator, Supreme Court nephew, and author of three volumes of North Carolina case law. Today on JoCoYo, we're pulling him out of the footnotes.

It's 1779. You live in Smithfield, North Carolina — population: several dozen, ambitions: modest. Then one Thursday morning, the entire government of North Carolina comes riding down the road. All of it. And it needs a place to sleep. Running on Empty — the story of the time the state ran out of options and showed up unannounced in a two-year-old town.

In 1792, a Johnston County man left his son a still in his will. It seemed straightforward enough. Two hundred years, ten federal indictments, that tradition is now open Thursday through Saturday with tours and a tasting room. Welcome to White Lightning. The government gave up. Johnston County=1, Government=0. This is White Lightning.

People who visit Hannah Creek Swamp report cold spots, feelings of dread, and the sound of a hanging. Johnston County has a lot of history, but this particular stretch of swamp has a story soaked into it — a Confederate lieutenant, a band of rogue soldiers who crossed every line, a gold crucifix found around the wrong neck, and a revenge killing so far outside the rules of war that nobody's qu...

It could have been a great April Fool's joke if it weren't so...yikes! In May 2021, a Russian criminal gang broke into the largest fuel pipeline in America using one password. One forgotten, inactive, nobody-bothered-to-delete-it password. Within 72 hours, three quarters of North Carolina's gas stations were empty. People were fighting in line at a Marathon station in Knightdale. Someo...

In March 1865, Sherman's army stood poised to burn Raleigh to the ground. What stopped it wasn't a general, a battle, or a treaty — it was a railroad stationmaster with no rank, no uniform, and a white flag he had no authority to wave. This is the story of how a desperate ride through Johnston County's pine woods, a "brisk skirmish" five miles east of Clayton, and a peace parley at a white frame h...