Background
Gabriel Jones was born on May 17, 1724 near Williamsburg, Virginia, of English-Welsh parents, John and Elizabeth Jones. Following the father's death when Gabriel was still in his infancy the family returned to London.
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Gabriel Jones was born on May 17, 1724 near Williamsburg, Virginia, of English-Welsh parents, John and Elizabeth Jones. Following the father's death when Gabriel was still in his infancy the family returned to London.
In London in an English boys' school Gabriel received his preparatory education, and subsequently served a law apprenticeship with one John Houghton.
Before reaching manhood Jones had returned to Virginia and at the age of twenty-one had qualified as king's attorney for both of the newly organized frontier counties, Frederick and Augusta. For the thirty years between this time and the outbreak of the Revolution he rode the circuit of these and other Valley counties as a loyal representative of his king, and served almost continuously as a representative from some one of them in the Virginia House of Burgesses.
It was in connection with this service that he "found" young George Washington and sponsored his entry (1758) into public life as a burgess from Frederick County. Jones is represented as having done yeoman service among the frontiersmen in behalf of the youthful political aspirant. It is a tribute to the man and his integrity and an indication of the esteem and respect in which he was held that his lukewarmness and near antagonism to the Revolutionary movement seems to have enhanced rather than diminished his prestige. He was allowed to continue as the attorney for the state (if he so desired), but apparently did not continue, and a year or so later he became the prosecutor for the new county, Rockingham.
Furthermore, in 1777 he was one of three commissioners designated by the Virginia Assembly to ascertain for the Continental Congress the reasons for disaffection around Fort Pitt. Twice in 1779 he was elected by the Assembly as a delegate to the Continental Congress but did not serve.
Again in 1788 his state honored him by placing him at the head of the list of judges of the newly organized state court system, but he still refused to serve. His political activities after 1781 were confined to one session of the legislature (1783) and the convention of 1788 that ratified the new federal Constitution.
Gabriel Jones died at the place that for more than half a century had been his home on the banks of the Shenandoah.
In his religious denomination Jones was an Anglican.
In his political affiliation Gabriel Jones was a Federalist.
His eccentricities not only furnished tales and bywords but set the pace for frontier characteristics and idiosyncrasies. The outbursts of Jones' temper, who was called the "peppery old gentleman" became classic; the Augusta County Records reveal that the county court once threatened a jail term for one Mr. Holmes if he "did not quit worrying Mr. Jones and making him curse and swear so".
Physically, Jones was of short stature, and according to an extant contemporary portrait of him by artist John Drinker, Jones sported a wig and an eyepatch over his right eye. According to Jones's descendants, it was supposed that his right eye was injured in his earlier years while others attributed the loss of his right eye to an accident during his later years. Jones was completely blind in his right eye, and had likely suffered his injury prior to his tenure as Clerk of Court for Hampshire County in 1757.
Philip Doddridge described Jones as wearing a bicorne hat, "frilled shirt bosom", and waistbands. He further described Jones as sporting "powdered hair", a blue coat, a white vest, a cravat, silk stockings, and silver knee and shoe buckles
Quotes from others about the person
Jones was memorialized in historian Joseph Addison Waddell's Annals of Augusta County, Virginia (1886), in which Waddell remarked of Jones: "He was considered a man of great ability and unbending integrity. His only fault, or the only one which tradition tells of, was an extremely irritable temper, which, when aroused, expressed itself in the strongest terms he could command, mingled with no little profanity. Having a scorn of all dishonesty and meanness, he did not spare a miscreant by tongue or pen. "
In 1749 Gabriel Jones married Margaret (Strother) Morton, a widow, by whom he had four children. She was a daughter of a prominent Tidewater family and through her he became a close kinsman of the Lewis family of the Valley and of the Madisons.