White Plains Cemetery, dating to 1780, is a family burial ground typical of those once common during the settlement of America, when long distances between family farms and churches made such cemeteries practical and plantation burials became a Southern tradition. It is the resting place of Nathaniel Jones (1749-1815), a prominent North Carolinian whose life spanned the Revolutionary War and Federalist era and who served as a Wake County Commissioner, Justice of the Peace, Sheriff, Clerk of Court, member of the General Assembly, the Council of State, and the Constitutional Convention in Hillsborough in 1788. Archaeology has identified at least nine other graves in this family plot. When Jones died in 1815, a half-century before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, he directed that his twenty-nine slaves be freed, writing that every humane person, regardless of color, was entitled to freedom and that his conscience condemned him for keeping them in slavery. Family history indicates that those interred include Millicent Blanchard Jones, Robert Jones, Evan Jones, Rachel Perry Jones, Alfred Jones, Burwell Perry Jones, Timothy Walton Jones, Wesley Jones, and Martha Jones Courts. By 1811 Nathaniel Jones had amassed over 10,000 acres in the eastern part of today's Cary, and his White Plains plantation house stood about a mile away until the 1950s. After years of neglect, descendants found the cemetery in 1971 with its 15-foot obelisk leaning dangerously and Rachel Perry Jones's box tomb scattered; stabilization and reassembly followed, a new iron fence was erected, the site was deeded to the Town in 1989, and in 2010 a new engraved stone was placed on Rachel Perry Jones's tomb with markers installed for other family members.