It took Jones four years to complete his writing assignment in 1876, which covered seventy years of conference history in four volumes. After the publication of Volume I, twenty-one years passed before the publication of Volume II. In the more than one hundred years since then, Mississippi Methodism has anticipated the publication of the last two volumes.
Discovered in a Trunk
The last known location of Jones' handwritten manuscript was with family members in 1910, but it was never found when the conference was ready to publish it in 1929. The manuscript remained hidden until discovered in a trunk in 2009 by descendants Henry Scott and Rosemary Scott Ainsworth. The siblings donated the manuscript to the J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism in memory of their grandmother, Mary L. Holloman Scott.
Archive staff traced the provenance and determined the papers to be the long lost manuscript of volumes III and IV of John G. Jones' A Complete History of Methodism as Connected with the Mississippi Conference 1799 to 1869.
Jones (1804-1888) was a Methodist minister whose eyewitness accounts and observations cannot be found in any other source. His writings are a valuable resource to anyone interested in Mississippi and Methodist history.
Now Available for Study
The Commission on Archives and History, along with the J.B. Cain Archives staff, set out to digitize, transcribe, index and publish the 600+ page manuscript. The Commission engaged editor and historian Walter G. Howell, Ph.D., to write the introduction, chapter notes, and epilogue for these volumes. Completed in 2016, the book is now available for purchase at the Mississippi Conference Headquarters, UMC, or the J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism, Millsaps College Library.
