Paul B. Dunn

Lightning Slinger of Andersonville Paul B. Dunn

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 railroad tracks in the Southern states. Teddie O'Dunn was a telegrapher-depot agent, or "lightning slinger." Born in Tennessee, the youngest child of a rowdy Irish father and an orphan girl raised in West Virginia, he was named for President Teddie Roosevelt. His boyhood days were spent in the Civil War prison camp in the town of Andersonville, Georgia. He learned telegraphy at the knee of a kindly woman agent-operator at the Central of Georgia Railroad Depot. Sixty miles southeast of Andersonville 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