Emma Hamilton Dancing

Born in 1882 in Lynchburg, Virginia, Shadrach Carrington Jones moved to Massachusetts with his family when he was young. He graduated from Saugus High School, where he excelled in athletics and debating and graduated with honors. He attended Harvard College with the class of 1904. On Nov. 12, 1908, he and two others filed a patent in Boston, Mass., for a “noise deadening means for railways.” He then studied at the Sheffield Scientific School from 1906 to 1907 and from 1909 to 1910.

Jones, known as “Shad,” taught engineering at the Western University in Kansas City, possibly at Tuskegee Institute, and at Wilberforce University in Ohio. From 1916 to 1922, he worked as an engineer in West Africa and the Canary Islands. A passport application dated 1920 shows that he was living in Columbus, Ohio, and left the United States on Dec. 5, 1916, to go to Monrovia, Liberia, to work as a mechanical instructor on behalf of the Caroline Donovan Institute, Grand Bassa, Liberia. From 1923 to 1940, he worked in various positions with the YMCA in Ohio. He was then the associate editor of the Ohio Sentinel, a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, and wrote two popular weekly columns. In 1927, he was awarded a Holstein award for his writing by Opportunity magazine, an honor which was reported in the New York Times.

Jones was married to Caroline (the former Carrie Hamilton Grant, mother of Effie Ella Grant Hardy), who predeceased him. His obituary of July 8, 1950, in the Cleveland Call and Post noted that he died at the New Jersey home of his stepdaughter, Mrs. Hardy.