The Jones House Railing Comes Off for the Music

Stand on the King Street sidewalk in front of the Jones House and look up. Two sugar maples sit on the hill above you. Old enough to have been here during the Civil War.

Both have cables supporting branches. There used to be three.

The stone wall you're standing beside is younger than the trees. It exists because the town took a bite out of this hill. Federal work crews from the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs program, laid it up in 1938 when the property was cut back to widen King Street. The house started with six acres. It has one.

Up the slope is the porch, and on the porch is a railing that somebody has taken a saw to.

The cut is deliberate. From the town's landmark designation report:

This railing has been cut at the sides to allow for its removal for live outdoor music. When not removed, it locks in place with metal latches.

That's the Jones House earning its keep. The town's cultural center, where bands play the front porch and the Cultural Resources department works out of the rooms behind. The summer concert series has run Friday nights on that lawn since June 5. Local music at 5:30, free, rain or shine. And that can keep happening next summer because of folks like Jessica Mitchell, Eric Plaag and many others.

This Friday is the last one of the summer. Meris Gantt and Devin Lacey, then Gary McCullough and South on Something wrapping at 7:30. Metered parking downtown is free after five.

John Walter Jones came from Alleghany County by way of the Chattanooga College of Medicine, and arrived in Boone in 1902 to practice with Dr. Thomas Blackburn. He married into the Blackburns, one of Boone's most prominent families, in 1907. That same year he bought six acres near the middle of a small commercial town. The house was finished in 1908.

He paid for a good deal of it in doctoring. The National Register nomination says the building materials "were obtained largely through exchanges of materials for medical services instead of cash payments."

The Watauga Democrat reported in April 1908 that Dr. and Mrs. Jones were moving in. He ran his practice out of the house before taking an office above what is now the Mast General Store. He died in January 1925, and his wife Mattie enclosed the back sleeping porch sometime in the five years after.

The ground was old before he got there. One of Boone's first two residents had a house on this lot. A lawyer named George N. Folk lived here before the Civil War. Somebody taught school in a one-room building on the corner.

That is a lot of history for one acre. Somebody has to keep it standing.

The report that describes those trees and that wall runs thirteen pages. The commission started it in late 2023 and took the next steps this summer. It dates the back porch to between 1925 and 1930 by setting a photograph from around 1915 beside one from 1939, then reading the sawn joists still visible in the attic where the roof had been cut away. It cites deed books, and Watauga Democrat issues from 1908 and 1920, and a box of family photographs.

Riley Ziegler wrote it, and finished it as a volunteer after her term ended and she moved out of Boone. Eric Plaag helped, and told us his work on it was free of charge. A professional courtesy, he called it.

I called Boone's planning office on Monday with a list of questions. Mitchell answered every one of them, unhurried, in a quiet voice, until they made sense. The town is lucky to have her steering this from their side.

Dr. Elizabeth "Bettie" Bond sat on that commission from the day it was created in 2007 until this year, and chaired it from the beginning. Before that she taught in the Appalachian State University History Department from 1973 to 1996. She sits on the committee that holds the family photographs Ziegler used to date the porch. When council honored her this July, the resolution ran to the Downtown Boone Post Office, the Junaluska Community, and the historic district itself.

She left in 2026. By July the commission was down to two people.

On July 7 the two of them met for twenty-two minutes, 2:59 to 3:21. Two is enough to hold an advisory meeting and not enough to hear a case, so through July and August the commission could not rule on a single application to alter a historic building. Applicants were told so.

In those twenty-two minutes they agreed to write the Clawson Burnley Park interpretive panel themselves, on a shared folder, between meetings, because there was no time in session. Then they went looking for their own replacements.

Chair Vardell Smyth asked about recruiting from the App State History Department, which is where Bettie Bond taught for twenty-three years. Bennie Gaetano said he'd ask his contacts. Somebody suggested the Watauga County Historical Society.

Then Virginia Roseman, the council liaison, named the hard part. Members have to live inside the town limits.

It kept catching people. The town attorney had to turn away one applicant whose spouse works in Planning and Inspections. Another man came to the August meeting to volunteer and was told he lives outside the line.

The town advertised two regular seats and a student seat. One person applied.

One Appalachian State student filed on July 2. Council made the appointment on Aug. 12, and that appointment is the only reason the commission can hear a case again. It put them back to three.

The house was already protected, but as one building inside a district. Designation protects it on its own merits.

The house has been inside the Downtown Boone Local Historic District since 2021, which already requires permission for exterior work. It has been on the National Register since 1987. When the town bought the house in 1983, Mazie Levenson attached restrictions requiring it be used as a cultural or historic center or park. And the property tax deferral that usually makes designation worth an owner's while does nothing here. The town's own building is already exempt.

Mitchell says the landmark designation "does not introduce any new COA requirements."

On Aug. 18, while the report was still working its way toward council, the town filed a Statement of Conformity for timber replacement at the Jones House. Application 26-0601, still pending. The machinery was already running.

Two things. Somebody has to write down what matters about this house. And it stays written. The ordinance that creates a landmark has to name the elements "integral to its historical, architectural, or prehistorical value." A district never does that house by house. And inside a district, the ordinance says the commission shall waive the demolition delay for a building it finds has "no special significance or value toward maintaining the character of the district." A landmark has already been found to have it, in writing, by name.

Whether a sawn railing that comes off for bands makes that list, nobody has said.

Asked what the designation is for, Mitchell put it this way.

The HPC has been working on this since 2023, and Staff can see their enthusiasm for bringing this forward, as it will be presented to the Town Council as the next step in the process. The designation furthers the Town's historic preservation efforts.

Enthusiasm is the right word, and it is worth being precise about whose. Mitchell is town staff and this is her job. The commissioners are not paid, Ziegler finished the report as a volunteer, and Plaag did not bill for his. Nobody has to worry about this house, and that is not an accident. It is what twenty years of people like them buys. They added another layer anyway.

Council took the report up Wednesday night. Once submitted, the State Historic Preservation Office gets thirty days, then it comes back to the commission, then a public hearing this fall, then a council vote near the end of the year. Two members voted 2-0 to send it that far.

Meanwhile the cables stay in the maples, and two commission seats are still open. You have to live in town if you want a seat.

Friday the railing comes off again. Last show of the summer, 5:30 on the lawn. Nobody sitting on the grass has to think about any of it, which is the point.