Photograph by Roberta Moore at the Conservation Fund
Florence Walker has lived for decades outside Detroit, but she grew up in central Georgia’s Jones County, playing around a patch of hilly woods that, to a bunch of kids, seemed like any other tree-filled rural property. Back then, she was oblivious to the history of those woods—and the significance of the giant rock piles within them.
Walker is the great-great granddaughter of Jacob Hutchings—the previous owner, more than a century ago, of what’s come to be known as Jake’s Woods, located about 15 minutes northeast of Macon. Hutchings, a skilled stone mason born into slavery in 1831, quarried the 28-acre boulder field by hand, both as an enslaved man prior to the Civil War and later an emancipated business owner. He succeeded in buying the quarry during Reconstruction and played a significant role—literally—in building the county, carving the boulders for granite blocks that can still be found in street curbs, cemeteries, and the steps of the former courthouse and city jail in nearby Clinton. Hutchings would go on to become one of the first Black legislators in the Georgia General Assembly, and the first from Jones County, prior to his death in 1909. “Jake was a tall man of great strength, polite and well respected,” reads a historical marker in his honor today.
“We are very proud of our Jacob Hutchings,” says Walker, “and what he did in his life.”
The Hutchings family had passed down and overseen stewardship of the woods for generations, ending with Walker, who served as executrix of the estate that owned the land. By officially letting go and selling the property, Walker hopes the woods will be preserved in a functional way—and that her resilient ancestor’s legacy will be spotlighted like never before.
Should all go as planned, the quarried scars left by Hutchings’ handiwork so long ago will translate to unique fingerholds as a…
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