Jones County

Jones County, established Feb. 12, 1779, is located in the state’s coastal plain, about 100 miles southeast of Raleigh. Its county seat is the town of Trenton, the smallest in the state by population (274).

The mostly rural farming county ranks as the fifth-least-populous county in the state, with 9,597 residents. Its total employment is 1,694 (17.7%).

The most profitable agricultural product is hogs, while the largest product by acreage is soybeans.

The type of livestock produced most by total number is meat-type chickens. The largest manufacturer is Smithfield Foods (the county’s 15th-largest employer), which manufactures pigs and pork products and employs fewer than 50 people.

NC State is Here

North Carolina’s Largest Piece of Property

Hofmann Forest, the largest university-owned research forest in the world and the largest state-owned property in North Carolina, is a working, industrial-scale forest of 79,000 acres that spans Onslow and Jones counties. Located 150 miles from the Raleigh campus, Hofmann Forest is owned by the NC State Natural Resources Foundation and is named for pioneering Austrian-born forester Julius Hofmann.

A total of 31,798 acres of the forest lie in Jones County.

Hofmann has a mix of managed pine plantations, natural pine and hardwood stands, along with some agricultural fields, providing College of Natural Resources students and faculty unique opportunities for research, demonstration and sustainable forest management. Numerous income sources on the property provide financial support to CNR. In 2016, a timber deed on 54,000 acres was sold to Resource Management Service, which provides consistent annual income to CNR scholarship funds.

The arrangement encompassing the timber deed also included agricultural expansion, particularly in Jones County.

Privately owned by the university, Hofmann Forest is not accessible or open to the public. However, Hofmann hosts many groups, both within and outside the forestry sector, to demonstrate the techniques and benefits of managed forests. The forest is available for NC State research, demonstration projects and educational visits.

Forest namesake Julius Hofmann was named the inaugural head of the NC State Department of Forestry in 1929. (Read more.)

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