1998.

Johnston County.

Republicans take control of the county commission for the first time since 1928. The firewall that had held through decades of presidential Republican waves finally breaks.

Same election. Same county. Same year — Dorothy Johnson becomes the first African American ever elected to a countywide office in Johnston County's history.

Two stories. Running in opposite directions. Happening at the same time.

How does that happen? And what does it tell us about what Johnston County was becoming?

This time on JoCoYo: "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

At the turn of the twentieth century, Selma, North Carolina was the biggest town in Johnston County. Bigger than Smithfield. The county seat. A town that had existed since 1777.

Selma beat it — in thirty-three years — starting from a railroad station and a grid of lots.

Then a beetle crossed the Rio Grande. And cotton prices fell to five cents a pound. And three mills closed. And by 1992, there were twenty-five empty buildings on Raiford Street, and a town manager who couldn't sleep.

What do you do when the thing that made you is gone?

There's a town in Johnston County most people know from an exit sign and a story about a possum. Four Oaks. Population around two thousand. Nice little place.

But here's what the founding mythology leaves out: the man who owned the ground.

His name was Isaac Evans. He was Black. His family had been free since the 1700s. And in 1886, when a railroad colonel came looking for land to build a town on, it was Isaac Evans's forty acres that became the footprint of Four Oaks.

Every block. Every deed. Every brick building along that old railroad strip — it all starts with him.

So who was Isaac Evans? Where did his family come from? And why does that phrase — free since the 1700s — point toward one of the most overlooked stories in this county's history?