After many victories, War of 1812, was lost at sea with his sloop Wasp. Lived at "Rockrest," 3 miles east.
Johnston Blakeley, North Carolina's most noted naval hero of the War of 1812, was born in October 1781 in Seaford, County Down, Ireland. At the age of two he and his family emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. Soon after, his mother and an infant died. Johnston and his father, John Blakeley, moved to Wilmington. In 1790 he was taken into the home of Edward and Mary Mallett Jones, known as "Rockrest" in Chatham County. In 1792 Edward Jones became the state's solicitor general, a position he held for thirty-six years. Blakely attended school in Flatbush, New York, until the death of his father in 1796. At that time he returned to his home state, still the legal ward of Edward Jones, to attend the University of North Carolina. Jones had been a supporter of the fledgling university from its inception. Blakeley paid for his own education out of the income from Wilmington warehouses that he inherited from his father. When the uninsured warehouses burned in 1799, he withdrew from the university and applied to join the navy as a midshipman.
