A $145,000 grant from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust will be used to purchase playground equipment and pay for a shelter at the P.S. Jones Memorial Park.

The Washington City Council was informed of the grant during its Sept. 12 meeting.

The park, which will honor Peter Simon Jones, a Washington educator and for whom the former P.S. Jones High School was named, will be located on the land that once housed that high school, where Jones served from 1927 to 1949. Washington Colored High School’s name was changed in 1950 to honor Jones, former principal of the school.

Currently, the Beaufort County Ed Tech Center is housed in the buildings on the site, which is just south of the Beebe Memorial Park.

A previously awarded $55,000 grant from the trust has been earmarked to pay for a concrete walking trail around the park property. The City of Washington has committed funds to pay for restrooms on the south side of West 11^th Street and just across from Beebe Memorial Park. Councilman Doug Mercer is on the record as preferring the restrooms be built on the Beebe Memorial Park site.

The Beebe Memorial Park committee has been notified of the newest grant and will conduct a community meeting in the Ed Tech Center’s cafeteria at 6 p.m. Sept. 29. The committee was instrumental in planning and overseeing improvements made to Beebe Memorial Park in the past 18 years or so.

The P.S. Jones Memorial Park is viewed as a complement to Beebe Memorial Park, which was built in phases. That park includes walkways, an elevated viewing area, a memorial area honoring Bishop J.A. Beebe and local black history, benches and picnic tables, a gazebo-like shelter and a number of trees and shrubs. It also includes a circular memorial that contains headstones from graves from an abandoned cemetery in the northwest corner of the park. Beebe, who was from North Carolina, was elected as a bishop of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church on March 23, 1873.