Sallie Jones, announced in November as the 2024 Cary Hometown Spirit Award recipient, has called Cary her hometown for 100 years! She was born in 1924 in a house on the very corner in the very neighborhood where she now lives, just north of downtown on Academy Street.
Some of her ancestors were enslaved and came to the Cary area just after the Civil War, her great grandfather Alfred Arrington and grandfather Arch Arrington Sr. from Nash County and her great grandfather and great grandmother Yancey and Sabra Blake from Raleigh. Her great uncle Addison Blake was the founder of the Union Bethel AME Church in 1898. It still exists on North Acadaemy Street, the only one of four black churches founded in the 1800s still standing in its original location. Sallie's great aunt Eliza Blake Nichols was interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project in 1937 and left a recorded narrative of her memories of being enslaved as a child on the Whitaker plantation in Raleigh. Her grandfather Arch Arrington Sr. was the first African American businessman in Cary and a community leader.
As a child, Sallie Jones attended the Cary Colored School located behind the current Cary Elementary School along what was a dirt road and is now being developed as an expansion of the Higgins Greenway. Sallie lived through the Jim Crow era and remembers when the Colored School burned down in 1935 under suspicious circumstances. She would have started sixth grade the next day. Instead, she did not go to school at all that year, while her parents and other black families led by her uncle Arch Arrington Jr. protested the plan to send their young children to school in Method and worked together to establish a new school for African American children in Cary. Sallie's mother Emily Arrington Jones and her uncle Goelet Arrington worked with the Wake County Board of Commissioners to provide land for the school. Opened in 1937 on East Johnson Street, we know that school today as Kingswood Elementary.
When the new school for African American children opened, Sallie was too old to attend it. She had been studying her older siblings' text books during the time she didn't go to school and when it came time for seventh graders at Method to take the exam to determine if they would be allowed to continue their education at the high school level, Sallie's mother sent her to Method to take the exam. She passed, despite not going to school in sixth grade and skipping the seventh grade! She was a smart and determined young lady!
Sallie graduated from Berry O'Kelly High School in Method in 1940 and 
attended college at St. Augustine's in Raleigh. She earned a degree and taught in North Carolina schools in Parmele and Goldsboro for 12 years before accepting a job in Gary, Indiana, where she taught advanced French in the high schools there for 20 years. She lived through desegregation and the Civil Rights movement and helped integrate the schools in Gary.
When Sallie retired from her teaching career in Gary, she returned to Cary, back to the corner where she was born, and has remained since. For many years of her retirement back in Cary, Sallie volunteered with AARP as a community coordinator focusing on housing and other issues in the area. She learned about the plans to build a retirement community on Cornwall Road, where her church's cemetery dating back to the 1860s was located, and she personally took it upon herself to preserve it. Because of Sallie, an important piece of Cary's history was saved. Sallie continues to be an active member of First Christian Church, now located on Evans Road.
Sallie Jones is a proud Caryite and a proud American and has kept up her spirit and devotion to her town and country for many long years! The Friends congratulate her on being so deservedly chosen the 2024 Cary Hometown Spirit Award recipient!
