Additional information
by Joseph M. Jones (Author)
The Alabama-original Thomas McCrary was a single, 20-year-old settler of the first North Alabama county who came into that wild country in 1809 on the heels of departing Cherokees and Chickasaws. He had some means, but mostly in his favor was a wagon load of ambition. He married a young lady who bore four children then died, then married his first wife's cousin; she raised one child to maturity, a son--and that son's eleven offspring were sufficient to occupy, comfortably, the expansive tract of some 2,250 acres the first Thomas eventually accrued. Early, the McCrarys had a hundred slaves to count on as Thomas branched out to many other endeavors: cotton factor, entrepreneur in several agricultural enterprises, and member of the county governing body. This all came tumbling down in the Civil War; brief weeks after it ended in 1865, he died without a will, insolvent. His survivors regrouped, paid his debts, and managed to retain, to this day, most of his extensive land holdings. This makes the McCrary farm the oldest in Alabama, still owned and operated by the family of the original settler, who arrived ten years before Alabama became a state, an attainment his spirited energy helped achieve.
Author Biography
Joseph M. (Joe) Jones grew up on a north Alabama hillcountry, mule farm more akin in many ways to the Thomas McCrary farm of the 19th century than those of today's modern era. After USAF duty in the Korean War, he worked on Alabama newspapers before joining federal civil service in Huntsville, AL, first with the Army and then with the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He was the first news director of NASA's largest establishment, the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, for 14 years before he became the director of public affairs for the center, the position from which he retired in the early 1980s. Living in the countryside half a century and, himself, a part-time farmer growing nursery stock, he has been neighbor and friend to some of the McCrarys for that period, especially 100-year-old Thomas R. McCrary.
