John S. Koonce (1881-1940), son of John F. and Barbara Koonce, was a native of Onslow County. His widowed mother moved with her daughter and two sons to Raleigh in the mid-1890's following the death of her husband. She and her daughter worked as seamstresses while her son Charles F. took work as a printer, and her son John S. was employed as a clerk in the furniture store of Thomas and Maxwell. By 1905 the two brothers opened their own furniture store, Koonce Brothers, at 111 E. Hargett Street. When the two of them opened Koonce Brothers Hotel at 203 S. Salisbury Street in 1915, Charles opted out of the furniture business to run the hotel and to edit the labor oriented weekly newspaper, . From that time until his death 25 years later John S. Koonce was sole proprietor of the furniture store. Offering basic household furnishings and stoves, the store prospered. By 1923 Koonce had opened a second, smaller store in Zebulon, and in 1925 he built a new three-story brick building for his store at 111-113 E. Hargett Street. By the close of 1929, however, his customers began to feel financially pinched, and as the economic depression worsened in the 1930s, Koonce felt the pinch, too. By 1933 many furniture manufacturers and suppliers began to refuse him credit or to extend only a limited credit to him. Those who did found it necessary in 1934 to dun Koonce in order to extract payment from him. The surviving records of, the store end with the year 1935, though Koonce continued to hold his business together right up to his sudden death at the beginning of 1940.