John Evans

John Evans was born August 15, 1859, on Middle Sound near Wilmington, North Carolina, in an upstairs room that was slave quarters at the time and later held feed and harness. His mother, Hattie Newberry, cooked for the Newberry family who enslaved them. He never remembered seeing his father. He and his mother stayed with Mrs. Newberry after freedom, and he said he hardly noticed the difference. She taught him his letters and the Bible and was strict about his manners, which, he said, earned him far more money than his reading.

He grew up hunting and fishing on the sound, where partridges were so plentiful that even he and his mother ate them for breakfast. As a grown man he made enough selling fish to summer visitors along Wrightsville and Greenville sounds to last all winter. One day, delivering fish to the Airlie estate, Pembroke Jones heard his laugh. From then on Jones's wealthy New York guests paid him as much as sixty dollars a week to laugh for them and to make his famous wood-saw noise deep in his throat, which he could keep up for minutes at a time. He was given fine clothes and a tall silk hat.

He never married. For fifty years he was a well-known character among summer residents of the sounds and Wrightsville Beach. When interviewed at 78, he was crying the day's baseball game on the streets, ringing a bell between sandwich boards, and said that thanks to his manners he never went hungry.