In Perspective (Revisited)

In the last issue of Vero Beach Magazine, we showed the headstone of a Confederate soldier named Joseph E. Jones on the back page. There was no particular significance to the gravesite, so far as we knew — the photographer shot it for a story on the county’s oldest graveyard, the Winter Beach Cemetery. Fortunately, Eula Jones Andresen saw the story and set us straight. Eula, a teller at the Northern Trust Bank on Beachland Boulevard, is Joseph Jones’ granddaughter and rightfully proud of her heritage.

Born in Georgia, Jones moved with his family to Florida when he was 3. In 1862, at age 18, he joined the Confederate Army as a member of the Florida Light Artillery and saw action at Olustee — the only Civil War battle fought in Florida — where the thunder of cannon left him permanently deaf. After the war ended, he became a farmer, and in the 1890s moved to Vero, where he began raising vegetables in the area that even then was known as John’s Island.

Read the entire article in the November 1998 issue