While her husband's tailoring business at 119 Dearborn Street prospered and he achieved political success, Jones managed the family home as a center of black activism and resistance to the Black Codes and other restrictive laws like the Fugitive Slave Act. Their friends included prominent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Brown and his associates, described by Jones as "the roughest looking men I ever saw", stayed with the Joneses on their way east to their raid at Harpers Ferry. Jones provided new clothes for the radicals, including, as she recalled in an account given years later, the garb Brown was hanged in six months later.