One of Danville’s home-grown businesses will be celebrating its 100th birthday in a few years, as the Jesse Jones Sausage Company will honor a century of operations in 2026. Starting
Wilbur Clarence Daniel was born on May 12, 1914, in Pittsylvania County and was the son of Reuben Earl Daniel, a sharecropper, and his second wife, Georgia Lee Grant Daniel. He attended Mecklenburg County public schools until age fifteen, when he went to work as a store clerk to help support his family. In 1933 Daniel (called Clarence until adulthood, when he acquired the nickname Dan) joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in Spotsylvania County. He married Daisy Rivers Greene Fines on June 2, 1934, in Hyattsville, Maryland. The childless couple separated three years later. By 1939 Daniel had discovered that Fines’s divorce from her first husband had not been made final at the time she married Daniel. He sued for a declaration of annulment, which the Stafford County Circuit Court granted on September 16, 1939.