Lightning Slinger of Andersonville

After the Civil War, railroads were built to link the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the reunited nation. South of the Mason-Dixon line, work gangs were either Negro or Irish. The O’Dunn family was employed for three generations as Trackmen that built or maintained the railroad. Teddie O’Dunn was a telegrapher-depot agent, or “lightning slinger.” He learned telegraphy at the knee of a kindly woman agent-operator at the Central of Georgia Railroad Depot. Sixty miles southeast of Anderson-ville was a Colony City, Fitzgerald. Teddie went to Fitzgerald to work as a lightning slinger on the railroad connecting the new town to Atlanta and Florida. His family admonished him to have no association with Yankee girls that paraded the sidewalks of Fitzgerald. But Teddie was lightning struck, so to speak, by a small bundle of charm, the granddaughter of a Calvary man in General Sherman’s army. Their trials, tribulations and heartaches through their years fill this book.