Sheriff Jones Recalls 40 Years of Law Enforcement Work in Somerset County

Robert (Bobby) N. Jones, Maryland’s longest serving sheriff, has been the long arm of the law in Somerset County for 39-years. Since starting his career working in an antiquated jail built for henhouse robbers, drunkards, horse thieves, and criminals from another era in 1975, he has devoted a lifetime of work to combating crime. He kept jailbirds behind bars, prowled the dark night looking for problems, chased reckless drivers, corralled troublemakers, and oversaw the development of a modern law enforcement agency, as the decades flew by. Although he recalls a different time, place, and era for policing in Somerset County, the very popular sheriff successfully bridged the gap.

Jones started in law enforcement almost by accident. Sheriff Thomas H. Foxwell, Jr. while out fishing on the Chesapeake Bay, caught a tub of Spanish Mackerel. “On his way home, the sheriff stopped by to offer the fish to the people at the Oyster shucking house where I worked. While he was there I asked him if needed any help,” Jones recalls. “It wasn’t too long before I got a call asking me to work some weekends and holidays as a deputy. When I started that December, I went over to a deputy’s house to pickup an old badge and gun.”

The county slammer was built in 1850 and rebuilt after a disastrous 1902 fire. The place, designed to handle 16 inmates, averaged about twenty prisoners a day at the time. “We often worked alone, and we had some dangerous prisoners, from the Western Shore and elsewhere. Murders, work release, you name it. If they were incarcerated in Somerset County, we had them. If you opened that cell door for whatever reason to move some of those inmates around, you wondered what might happen sometimes,” the sheriff recalls.

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