Born on a farm in Madison, Maine, on August 2, 1858, Nellie Sawyer Kedzie Jones became one of America's most influential pioneers in home economics education and rural women's advocacy. Her remarkable 97-year life spanned nearly a century of dramatic social and technological change. At eleven, Nellie's family relocated to Kansas, where she would later graduate from Kansas State Agricultural College at just eighteen with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1876. After five years of teaching, she married Robert Fairchild Kedzie on December 28, 1881, but tragedy struck when her husband died from malaria just two months later. Widowed at twenty-three, Nellie transformed personal loss into professional opportunity. In 1882, she accepted a position at her alma mater, becoming Kansas State's first woman professor. By 1887, she had been promoted to full professor and department head, making her the first woman to head a university department in Kansas. Under her leadership, the college constructed Domestic Science Hall in 1897-the first building in America designed specifically for home economics education.

Political upheaval led to her departure from Kansas State in 1897, whereupon she joined the founding faculty of Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria, Illinois, serving until 1901. That year, she married Reverend Howard Murray Jones and taught briefly at Berea College in Kentucky before the couple settled on a Wisconsin farm in 1911. From 1912 to 1918, Jones wrote the beloved "Country Gentlewoman" column for The Country Gentleman magazine, offering practical advice to rural women through fictional letters to her "niece Janet." These columns, later compiled into "The New Home on the Old Farm," reached thousands of farm wives across America. In 1918, Jones became Home Economics Extension Leader at the University of Wisconsin, traveling throughout the state to organize homemakers' clubs and advocate for county home agents. By 1932, she had established 690 clubs across 43 counties. She retired in 1933 as the university's first woman professor emerita. Jones remained active well into her nineties, lecturing on "growing old gracefully" at age ninety.

She died on April 19, 1956, leaving an enduring legacy in women's education and rural advocacy.