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?

Gertrude Weil defied NC's 1920 "NO" on women's votes—mailed fire to an unknown Smithfield ally: "THINK RATIFICATION. Make us the PERFECT 36th!" Goldsboro's Jewish firebrand swam first into segregated pools at 80, battled 50 years unbowed. State caved 51 years late. She died 24 days after. Who in JoCo answered her call?

In 1945, Sula Hansley was a girl in a city of ash and ruins. A few years later, she was a woman in a quiet, tobacco-farming town in North Carolina. This episode explores the impossible distance between Berlin’s front lines and Four Oaks’ front porches—and the incredible, untold story of a survivor who built a life in the heart of Johnston County.

From Reconstruction to 1969—a 92-year silence in Johnston County's official history. Were there really no Black elected officials in between? Dive into the Fusion era's lost Black leaders, the Red Shirts' terror, and the laws that erased them from the record. JoCoYo uncovers the deliberate deletion of local Black political power.

Why was a Canadian-born Black actor named on a school in Selma, North Carolina? In this episode of JoCoYo, we trace the surprising story of Richard Berry Harrison, The Green Pastures, and the community that chose his name to stand for generations.

October 1912: A man steps off a train in Clayton, North Carolina, carrying a heavy secret hidden beneath fifty pounds of camera gear. He is Lewis Hine, a former schoolteacher turned investigator, sent by the National Child Labor Committee to expose the harsh reality hidden inside the town's booming cotton mill.

In this episode of JoCoYo, we pull back the curtain on a town once considered the most prosperous of its size in the world, where the promise of steady wages meant twelve-hour workdays for men, women, and children alike. Discover how Ashley Horne built an industrial empire from the wreckage of the Civil War, and join us as we follow the photographer who walked into the heart of that empire to document the truth—while the superintendent watched him work in silence.