Known as Clinton’s oldest house, the Macarthy-Pope House is believed to have been built between 1809 and 1810. Benjamin and William Trapp owned it from 1818 to 1832, and during the latter two years of that period Benjamin Trapp served as sheriff of Jones County. Charles Bernard Macarthy purchased the house in 1832 and lived there until his death in November 1861. For most of the years from 1826 until his death, he served as Ordinary of Jones County and clerk of the Inferior Court, and he died in office as Ordinary and clerk of the Superior Court. His father, Roger Bernard Macarthy, an original settler of Clinton, was the town’s first postmaster, had been appointed clerk of the Court of Ordinary in April 1808 before Clinton was founded in September of that year, and later served as a justice of the Inferior Court of Jones County. Roger Macarthy, born in 1858 according to the account, was a native of Ireland from County Cork, left Ireland in June 1793 after the “affair of ’93,” settled in New York where Charles was born in 1798, and is also considered likely to have given Clinton its name because George and DeWitt Clinton were prominent New York statesmen whose states’ rights principles would have been well known to him. After the War for Southern Independence, Mrs. Margaret E. Pope and Miss Rosetta Worsham, known as Miss Pope and Miss Zet, operated the Clinton post office from the house, which was also their home, until 1915. From then until its abandonment in 1940, the building was used as a tenant dwelling. In 1976 the Old Clinton Historical Society acquired the house and three and a half adjacent acres, including the 1842 two-story stone jail, the site of the 1820s Mansion House hotel of Hope Hull Slater, and part of the Butler Spring Reserve. Near collapse from time, neglect, and kudzu, the house was dismantled by hand, with each piece photographed, labeled, and stored, while its wood, mortar, nails, paint, brick, and wallpaper were researched and glass fragments were sent to Williamsburg, Virginia, for analysis. In 1982 the Society received the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation’s award for outstanding restoration, and for years each spring reenactors have portrayed on these grounds the two battles fought in Jones County during the Confederate War, the Battle of Sunshine Church and the Battle of Griswoldville.