(NOTE: The following appeared in the 1985 Odum Homecoming program and was written by Hazel Dean Overstreet. It is being reproduced here for the Odum, Georgia website….KH)
John Thompson’s old store set where Lloyd Jones’s abandoned store stands today.
The families in this outlying farm district who came to Odum to trade, so I’m told by Mrs. Susie Dent Daniel, were Thomas Dent, born in 1829, and moved to this section from Appling and Coffee County. Here, he married Miss Nancy O’Quinn. They settled about a mile from the Altamaha River (at the site of Arlie Anderson’s fishpond, which lies across the road from Lonnie O’Quinn’s house). Mose Spence (father of Mr. Allen Spence, prominent judge and lawyer in Waycross), Nancy and Betty Wilson, their brother, George Wilson, Sol Pye, Alec O’Quinn (father of Peter O’Quinn – of which several descendants are still living in this county), Bill Floyd, Isham Ogden (a place now owned by Tommy Horton, once owned by my father, Emory F. Dean, in which my father retained the oil, gas,, and mineral rights when he sold it).
LAWLESSNESS AND TERROR REIGNED AT ONE TIME IN ODUM
One interesting and sad story relating to Odum’s past happened in the year 1888, so it relates to Mr. Melton Boyd when one Henry Joyner killed the railroad operator by the name of Cannon. The feud revolved around some picture frames which were ordered by an old negro living in Odum. Mr. Joyner, seeing the frames, desired to pay the charges and take them. Mr. Cannon refused him his desire, knowing that this would be unlawful. Upon Mr. Cannon’s leaving for his vacation, Mr. Joyner besieged the relief operator and took the frames, declaring this was as Mr. Cannon would have it. Upon returning from his vacation and finding the frames missing, Mr. Cannon engaged Mr. Joyner in a fistfight at Depotepot. Mr. Joyner became enraged and rushed into the store of Mr. Leonard Carter, and needed any,fe, turned to the yard at Depotepotand knifed Mr. Cannon in the back, killing him. Mr. Joyner was sentenced (to the best of Mr. Boyd’s knowledge in Fargo) and died in prison. Mr. Boyd says Mr. Cannon was a peg-legged fellow.
Mr. Boyd states he was born in 1873, eight years after the Civil War, in Emmanuel County, fifteen miles from Swainsboro. His daddy was Henry Boyd, who served four years in the Civil War, moving his family to Wayne County in 1884 when Melton was a boy of eleven years. Henry Boyd (Melton’s father) bought a place from Jim Edenfield in 1884 and gave $400 for 112 acres (the place was initially known as Old Bell Place).
Mr. Boyd can remember playing in ditches and catching fish in ponds in the heart of Odum, along with where Cecil Withrow’s house now stands and where Depotepot is located now). Depotepot was removed in the year 1969.
Mrs. Susie Dent Daniel was born in 1878, about thirteen years after the Civil War. Her father was Thomas W. Dent, born in 1829; her mother was Nancy O’Quinn. Mrs. Susie possesses a love letter from Herrera to her mother, over a hundred years old. This couple settled about a mile from the Altamaha River across the road from Mr. Lonnie O’Quinn’s present place. Mrs. Susie says the only neighbors she recalls in her very earliest youth (around 1888) were the ones already mentioned – Mose Spence, Nancy and Betty Wilson and their brother, George Wilson, Sol Pye, Alex O’Quinn, Bill Floyd, Isham Ogden, and of course, her father, Thomas Dent.
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