Benjamin Franklin Jones (December 31, 1869 – September 26, 1935) was an American jurist and Republican Party politician who served as the Speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly in 1900.
Jones was born in Brooklyn in 1869, the son of Rev. John Jones and Elizabeth Holland. He was educated at Public School 10 and Brooklyn High School. He attended New York University, receiving a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1895 and a Master of Laws degree two years later. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1897.
He then moved to Maplewood, New Jersey and became involved in Republican politics. In 1899 he was elected to the General Assembly from Essex County. In 1900, at the age of 30, he served as Speaker of the Assembly for one term.
In 1906 Jones was appointed District Court Judge of the city of Orange, serving for five years. Following his retirement from the bench, he was appointed Essex County counsel, serving for three years. He also served as president of the Essex County Tax Board from 1917 to 1920, and during World War I served as a Government Appeal Agent.
Jones married Mabel L. Stevens in Homer, New York on May 17, 1917. They had two children: Benjamin Franklin, Jr., and Mabel Elizabeth.
Jones died at his home in Maplewood in 1935. He was 65.
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“Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable man in society, “never to contradict any body.””
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“I said in my novel that the clergyman is a kind of human Sunday. Jones and I settled that my sister May was a kind of human Good Friday and Mrs. Bovill an Easter Monday or some other Bank Holiday.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)