Wiley Jones

How this work helped shape America

Born enslaved in Madison County, Georgia, in 1848, Wiley Jones was taken to Arkansas as a child and remained enslaved until the Civil War. After emancipation, Jones worked as a mule driver, waiter and barber before accumulating capital through savings, lending and business investments. In 1886, he secured a franchise to establish a mule-drawn streetcar system in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and opened the line that October. Jones later expanded his transportation interests by acquiring another local street railway, while also investing in real estate, retail businesses and a fifty-five-acre recreational park. By the early 1890s, he had become one of Arkansas's wealthiest Black businessmen. Jones's ownership and expansion of street-railway infrastructure placed a formerly enslaved Black American directly in the development of urban public transportation during the rapid commercial growth of the post-Civil War South.