JoCoYo

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 most prosperous of its size in the world, where the promise of steady wages meant twelve-hour workdays for men, women, and children alike. Discover how Ashley Horne built an industrial empire from the wreckage of the Civil War, and join us as we follow the photographer who walked into the heart of that empire to document the truth—while the superintendent watched him work in silence.

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 Tuscarora War, and the man who saw it coming and helped cause it anyway.

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 quite known what to do with it for 160 years. It's a ghost story. It's a war crime story. It's also, it turns out, a case of mistaken identity stretching across two centuries — because the monster at the center of it was already dead before the Civil War started. The swamp, apparently, does not care about the timeline.

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. Someone issued an official government warning asking people to please stop filling plastic bags with gasoline. The pipeline that caused all of this runs right through Selma, on the same road everything in Johnston County has always run along. It has been that way for three hundred years. Turns out that's also a vulnerability.

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 house on the town square saved North Carolina's capital — and quietly set the stage for the largest Confederate surrender in the entire war.

March 5th, 1943. Clayton, North Carolina. A federal government rationing office gets mobbed. Fistfights break out. Arrests are made.Over gasoline coupons.Now — before you judge these people — you need to understand what March 1943 actually looked like in Johnston County. Three gallons of gas a week. A pleasure driving ban. Two hundred members of Congress quietly driving on unlimited fuel while their constituents couldn't get to church.Johnston County's patience had been stretched to the absolute limit.And then it snapped.This is We’re Not Gonna Take It.

There's a Chuck Norris joke you've never heard: there was someone who could beat him. Repeatedly. That man grew up on a farm in Knightdale, trained under Bruce Lee, sold Chuck Norris his karate studio, won everything worth winning in American martial arts, and invented kickboxing on the side. He is buried twelve miles from the Johnston County line. This podcast is apparently the first anyone around here has mentioned it.

March 1849. Stone Creek, Johnston County. Two thousand acres of cotton. Forty-five enslaved people. And a family about to be orphaned by death — then torn apart by war.The Snead brothers didn't start the Civil War. But they lived it up close — in the letters they wrote home, in the hands who slowed their work when news of Lincoln spread, in a family Bible where "Harriet and children gone to freedom, 1863" was entered like any other fact.Four brothers. Forty-five souls. One plantation watching the world crack open.This is People Get Ready.

In 1893, the American economy collapsed — and Johnston County's cotton farmers watched decades of work evaporate at six cents a pound. What came next was a gamble: build a curing barn you'd never operated, raise a crop you'd never grown, and sell it at an auction that didn't yet exist in your county. This is the story of how the Panic of 1893 killed King Cotton, how a sleeping blacksmith accidentally invented bright leaf tobacco, and how one desperate pivot in 1898 built nearly everything you see in Smithfield today.

For 250 years, Johnston County was farmland. Then Interstate 40 arrived, and Raleigh suddenly felt like a neighbor. This is the story of how one county went from tobacco rows to rooftops — and how a single date, October 1st, 1991, set everything in motion. From the first zoning ordinance to the Unified Development Plan being written right now, Johnston County has been racing to manage a growth it never quite asked for. The fields are still out there. But you have to look harder to find them.

Before it was I-95, before it was US 301, before Johnston County even had a name — there was a path. Deer made it first. The Tuscarora walked it for centuries. Colonial settlers used it as their address system. And today, seventy thousand vehicles a day travel it without a second thought. This is the story of Greens Path: the ancient road hiding in plain sight beneath the highway you drive every day.

He was a free Black saddler from Fayetteville, North Carolina. He had a wife, a newborn daughter, and a rare kind of stability. He gave it all up — and walked into Harpers Ferry with a rifle.Most history books remember John Brown's raid. Few remember the five Black men who joined it. Fewer still remember the one who held the line until he took three bullets in a doorway — and refused to surrender.This week, we're telling the story of Lewis Sheridan Leary. The man history forgot. The man who may have made emancipation possible.

In 1864, Johnston County farmer William Rains Lee made a choice few dared—he walked away from the Confederate cause. Once a loyal soldier in North Carolina’s 24th Infantry, Lee saw the truth behind the slogans: a “poor man’s fight” fueling a planter’s empire.With or Without You tells the untold story of a Confederate deserter who refused to die for slavery’s survival—and found courage in conscience. His quiet rebellion reveals the soul of a war North Carolina tried to forget.

In 1711, the Carolina frontier burned. The Tuscarora Nation—once rulers of North Carolina’s coastal plains—rose against English colonists after years of enslavement, land theft, and lies. At the center stood two leaders: Chief Hancock, who chose war, and Chief Tom Blount, who chose survival. Their decisions would determine whether the American colonies expanded—or collapsed before they began.Run to the Hills uncovers the forgotten war that opened eastern North Carolina and shaped America’s earliest frontier.

Pine Level, 1941. A high school girl signs up for Navy WAVES—needing her parents' signature. From Bronx boot camp to D.C. code rooms, Lenora Crocker Stanley breaks every ceiling. Back home, her fierce alto turns Legion meetings and hospital boards into battlegrounds.

Step onto the muddy banks of Moores Creek in 1776, where the fate of North Carolina—and the fledgling American Revolution—hangs in the balance. In this episode, we follow Colonel John Smith as he leads Patriot militia into one of the first decisive battles of the war: the Battle of Moores Creek Bridge. From midnight marches across rain‑soaked fields to the thunder of loyalist Highlanders charging through the dark, this is the story of nerve, strategy, and a bridge that changed a continent's history.

Strap in for the story of Easy Street Drag Strip, where Johnston County’s red clay meets American speed. We trace Korean War veteran Charles Tart’s journey from Army half‑tracks to Newton Grove farmland, where in 1957 he built Eastern North Carolina’s first drag strip from scratch. From moonshine‑chasing sheriffs to flathead Fords under homemade Christmas lights, this is the roar that turned backroads into racing history.

It's March 2, 1933, and a U.S. Senator fresh off busting the Teapot Dome scandal—America's biggest political corruption case—is secretly honeymooning with a glamorous Cuban widow when his train suddenly stops between Wilson and Rocky Mount. He doesn't get back on. In this episode of JoCoYo, we ride the rails with Thomas J. Walsh from Montana mines to Havana romance, through poisoning rumors and political enemies, to his mysterious final stop just 40 miles from Benson—where a political titan met eternity and Johnston County entered the history books.

A Scottish orphan sails from the Highlands to New Bern in the 1780s, builds a waterfront empire, and watches Union soldiers occupy his elegant mansion during the Civil War. Fast forward two centuries—what if one of his descendants became the voice that taught America to dream of Carolina? In this episode of JoCoYo, we trace a 250-year family journey from New Bern’s wharves to Chapel Hill’s piney woods, culminating in a shocking musical revelation that connects coastal commerce to Piedmont poetry—and North Carolina's red clay to an anthem we all know by heart.

Picture this: it’s 1932 in Selma, North Carolina. Gas is too expensive, cars are parked and useless, and farmers are hitching their mules to stripped-down Fords and rolling them straight through town—on purpose. They’re not just getting to town; they’re mocking the president and about to change history.

Find me someone that does not like the TV show Young Sheldon… Actually, don’t. I don’t want to meet that person. It seems like a stretch, but there’s so much of a connection to eastern North Carolina, including Johnston county. Makes me love the show even more.

I absolutely love it when we uncover almost uniquely geological marvels that exist under our feet, and in our backyard. Johnston County, and East, North Carolina, are home to thousands of lakes. You’ve never seen them, you say? You would know if we had thousands of lakes? Well, let’s take a trip.

No one would ever accuse central North Carolina of being a hotbed of science-fiction history. Yet, here we are.

There’s a place in Johnston County that’s older than the hills… Quite literally. It is completely out of place and a freak of nature.

This is the case where a tree likely change the course not just American, but also world history. In 1844, Henry Clay of Kentucky, sat under an oak tree in Raleigh and wrote a letter.

Hilery wanted a chance for his children. Legacy that they could build on. A legacy was made, but not by him and not the way that he wanted.

What’s in a name? Success.

To become a surveyor in colonial America made that you had made the big time. Your chance had come. It was up to people like John Hinton to take advantage of it.

For poor and poverty stricken young English man, making the trip over to America in the 17th and 18th centuries Was full of risk and danger. Sometimes, those are the only things that will work

Death at an early age was fairly common and colonial and early North Carolina’s history. So were multiple marriages as a result of the death of a spouse. It’s because it didn’t have doctors back then, right? Wrong.

This is the story about the Hunter family, two members of which were instrumental in the creation of North Carolina, although in very different ways

Turning a person into a hero is not doing anybody any favors. It gives you unrealistic expectations of that person and paints an untrue biography. Such as the case with Ralph Lane.

For all of our talk about colonial leaders and shapers of North Carolina history, they were millions of people who are not spoken about have not been spoken about and without hermit their contributions could not have happened.

By all accounts, Josiah Martin was not a bad guy. Just the absolute wrong guy… In the absolute wrong place… At the absolute wrong time.

John Hinton and his family, along with thousands of other North Carolinians in the colonial period, faced an identity crisis and some very hard choices.

John Hinton was loyal to the crown. It seems even to a fault. For new students of the regulator conflict in North Carolina, it would be easy to spot seeds of the revolution in it. So imagine being neighbors of the regulators while also being a law maker for the British government. This is where we find John Hinton.

The first recorded land deeds and land owners in the modern day county of Wake Meant that John Hinton was playing an outsized role in the development of the colony and later state Of North Carolina.

Before there was Johnston County, Wake County, or even a Carolina, North or South, there was Nansemond County and the forgotten people that it was named for.  Before the English came, this is partly their story.

Another gold rush, a shipwreck, a hurricane, and an overlooked cause for war. All here.

What do you do when opportunity comes your way? Do like Johannes Reith and grab onto it like it's going to run away. What happens when another one comes? Use both hands and grab again. This is a success story if I've ever heard one.

"Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb".  Wise words from Smashmouth. Admittedly, that band wasn't known for its wisdom, but it certainly works here. What kind of wisdom have we lost in our desire to gain knowledge? This is a story about a Greek fable, once widely known, that shaped American history in good and bad ways.

If there has been a person with more of a whirlwind life than Maggie Williams...Well, I’m not actually sure that person exists. But I guess that’s what happens when you marry a person that treats the line between genius and insanity like a jump rope. Spoiler alert: Big crossover event.

The Meadow/Newton Grove area of southeastern Johnston County has stories to tell. This one involves the old Whig Party and a man that acted on his conscience, changing the religious aspect in Johnston County and eastern NC permanently. A Monk that wasn't a monk, but was deeply religious, nonetheless.

How does Johnston County keep producing music legends? What does this legend have to do with the Battle of Bentonville? In a word: Everything.