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Toombs County Magazine Fall/Winter 2022
Recollections of the Past
In January 2020, Dianne Dees took the inheritance she received from her parents and purchased an old house in Cedar Crossing. For forty years or so, the house had been trashed by one renter after another. Some said it was too far gone to save. A couple of folks went so far as to suggest that putting a match to it would be a mercy. And yet, hidden beneath years of decay and decline, Dianne saw what once had been. From old courthouse records, she found the 1903 house had originally been given a Tattnall County address. In 1905, Cedar Crossing became a part of the newly established Toombs County. On social media, Dianne announced her intent to redeem the old house with a picture of its fallen estate. “Not because of what it looks like now,” she wrote, “but because of what it looks like in my memory.”
The community of Cedar Crossing had been home for Dianne her entire life. “When I was a kid,” said Dianne, “we would walk from our house about a half mile down the road to my parent’s store at least once a day.” This was the early 60s when the store was H.J. Fowlers Grocery. Before her parents took it over, it was run by her grandfather and was called B.F. Miller’s Grocery. “There were always men sitting in front of the store talking and gossiping.” On her way to the store, Dianne passed the old house. “Every time I walked by, I’d see the two old ladies that lived there sitting on the porch. Most times, other ladies would be there visiting with them.” She smiled, a distant look in her eyes. “I would love to hear one of their conversations now.”
Dianne recalled details of the exterior of the house as if it was only yesterday when she’d last passed it by. “Most times, someone was sitting on the bottom level, and there was always a beautiful fern in a concrete planter on each side on the top level. The porch went across the front and down the right-hand side. There was a white picket fence across the front and a carriage house in back. I thought it was the prettiest house I had ever seen.”
Although she had never been inside, Dianne had visited with her grandmother, Trudy Miller, or “Ma Miller”, as all knew her. “Children didn’t go inside. Our area had no television, so we played outside all day. You certainly didn’t sit around with adults when they were talking, either.”
As the new owner of a house with nearly 120 years of history, Dianne wanted to know more. “When I was a kid,” she said, “this is what I wanted to do. I have always loved history. Old things spoke to me.” She valued conversations with older people. “I always wanted to preserve something from the past. The people who lived here are gone, but the house still speaks of that time. Even the old trees in the yard witnessed lives and events that I wish I could hear.”
Dianne researched newspaper archives with Cedar Crossing news and historical documents at Ladson Genealogical Library while also talking with older folks in the area. She learned that the sisters, Pennye Parker Edenfield and Ethyl Parker, received the house from their father, E.F. Edenfield, and owned it jointly.
From Jerry Dees, who lived most of his life in the house across the road, she learned, “Ms. Ethyl’s son Frankie died in the home after what he thought was a diabetic coma. As a kid, I had heard this story too,” said Dianne. “He also said a Dr. Odom lived in the house before Ms. Pennye and Ms. Ethyl.”
Dianne contacted Harry Edenfield, a grandson of Ms. Pennye Parker Edenfield. “He had many fond memories of the house and of spending summers there with his grandmother. His grandfather, Ms. Pennye’s husband, was Clayton Edenfield. They had one son, Clayton Gibbs Edenfield, who was his father.” She also learned that the sister’s parents were Missouria Odom and Edward Franklin Parker.
Dianne returned to the Ladson Genealogical Library, where she finally made a connection. “The sisters were Dr. Odom’s nieces.” Still, she had no proof that Dr. Odom or any doctor, for that matter, had ever lived in the old house. Except for the story the house told. As she began to clean out the old house, an exam room, medicine cabinets, and an outside entrance was clearly distinguishable.
According to archives from the Lyons Progress, Dianne learned that there were four doctors in Cedar Crossing in the early 1900s: Dr. Gray, Dr. Jim Hall, Dr. J. C. Collins, and Dr. Odom. And if that wasn’t enough, there was a Dr. Mobley that “lived up the river.” “In those days, doctors couldn’t make a living just practicing medicine,” said Dianne.
Payments were commonly made in eggs, chickens, and fresh vegetables. “Dr. Odom owned a lot of land and farmed.” In the August 8, 1913 edition of the Lyons Progress, in a section entitled “Cedar Crossing News,” Dianne read, “Dr. D. P. Odom is a good farmer as well as a good doctor. He has 60 acres in cotton, as fine as you ever looked at, 75 acres in corn, velvet beans, and pinders,” she read. “His wife, Leola Mann Odom, died in 1934, and Dr. D. Odom died in 1938. They didn’t have any children.”
For Dianne, renovating the old house preserved a bit of her community’s history. When she stepped inside the old house for the first time, she had a lot of emotions, but sweet nostalgia was not one of them. The task ahead would require a strong stomach and some serious help. To begin, she said, “I called my granddaughter Bessie Coleman and my Aunt Lena.”
While the world was masking up for Covid, Dianne and her family were masking up to shovel everything from household trash to discarded clothes and piles of dog poop from the old house. “The trash was literally up to our waists in every room. We went in with shovels, pitchforks, and construction trash bags.”
From old tax records, Dianne ascertained that the back of the house was added on in 1948. “It was completely rotten, and the porches were too dangerous to walk on. The floor in the only bathroom had rotted through to the ground.” The kitchen contained an old greasy stove and a worn-out refrigerator with contents that could be used for biological warfare. The yard was in as bad a shape as the house itself. It was difficult to imagine the negligent mindset that led to the unsanitary condition beneath the house. “It appeared that someone had just tossed the trash under the house. I guess the pile in the backyard had gotten too tall to dump any more trash there,” said Dianne with a roll of her eyes. “My husband and stepson, James,” owners of AAA Rentals, “brought some of their large machines and loaded the mounds of trash from the back yard. I rented a dumpster and filled it several times with household trash.”
This old house had been disregarded. Its worth forgotten. But there was something I was missing here. Why was restoring it so important to Dianne? As I sat in the shade of the newly renovated side porch where the two sisters had once spent afternoons with neighbors and listened to Dianne describe the work she’d done, the answer to that question came through another completely unrelated to the house. “What year did you graduate?” I asked. It was a question I commonly asked to help me put the outline of events in perspective. I assumed she went to Lyons High School (as it was known at the time) since she’d already said she had lived in Cedar Crossing her entire life.
“I didn’t,” said Dianne. She smiled at my confusion. “I didn’t graduate,” she clarified. “You couldn’t go to school back then if you were pregnant or married. I was both. Pregnant and married at thirteen.”
This was in 1971. In the years that followed, Dianne kept house and raised three children. “My mom and dad opened the store at 6:00 in the morning and closed it at 11:00 at night, seven days a week, so I was on my own.”
When Dianne turned thirty, she got her GED. “Somehow, I passed it without studying,” she said. “I guess I’d learned enough from the school of hard knocks to figure out what I needed to know,” her eyes crinkled into a smile. With her GED, she went to work as a clerk at Georgia State Prison. “I almost quit after the first day. You go in, and they lock you in. I thought, ‘How can I get out of this?’ But by the second day, you couldn’t run me off. I loved my work.”
Over the next ten years, she worked at Telfair State Prison while taking courses at Brewton-Parker College. In 1997, she had completed her degree in Psychology. Within three years of earning her psychology degree, she was promoted to the chief counselor at Montgomery State Prison.
A few years later, she earned a degree in Biblical Theology. “It was a college program that was offered every two years to inmates and one staff member,” said Dianne.
No question, she had had a tough start. But Dianne was no longer a fourteen-year-old mother and wife. When she divorced in 2000, she moved forward. Dianne took hold of every life lesson and grew from it. Nothing was wasted. At the same time, she had the courage to let go of what could not be restored. Knowing the difference was the key.
In 2007, Dianne married Louie Dees and moved into the big house he had built for his family in the 70s. His house sits right on Highway 56. From the back porch of her renovated old home, Dianne pointed to the beautiful brick home built by her husband. She smiled. Both lands joined with the purchase of the old house.
In 2015, Dianne retired as Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment at Telfair State Prison. The years following her retirement were not as she imagined, as she dealt with arthritis and other health issues. When she bought the old house, Dianne had undergone nine surgeries, including three back surgeries. Even so, she had no lack of grit and determination.
“My labor was cheaper than anyone else’s,” she laughed. Dianne stripped the walls and ceilings herself. “I removed the ceiling tiles that had been installed to lower the ceiling to eight feet instead of the original 10-foot ceiling and removed the old insulation that had become home to many decades of rats and squirrels.” With the walls stripped down to the original wood boards, she went room by room, removing layer after layer to uncover as much of the original design as possible.
TOP Dianne's aunts, Lena and Patsy, helped paint and remove trash during the two years it took to complete the project.
“Three of the four fireplaces had been boarded up,” said Diane. “One had been filled in with concrete for a wood heater pipe. I opened them all up, bought antique mantels I found on Facebook Marketplace, and put electric logs in each one.” One of the most impressive restorations was the porcelain tub she reinstalled in one of the bathrooms. “It had sat on the front porch for a long time.”
Moving the 300-pound tub into the bathroom was no small feat. But restoring it was a challenge all of its own. “I called a guy that restores them, and he said he was booked up for years,” said Dianne. “He said, ‘I’ll tell you how to do it.’” It took about ten applications of the cleaner he suggested. But when it was done, it looked like new.
Restoring the old house during the height of Covid-19 was no small venture. Thankfully, Dianne had family to lend a hand. With Bessie and Lena, the trash inside was removed. Dianne’s husband, Louie, and stepson, James, cleared the rubbish in the yards and under the house. “My aunts Lena and Patsy helped paint, and my cousin Sammy Miller moved the grass. Terry Davis, my brother-in-law, fixed the top of my chimney. My son, Stephen Foskey, and grandson, Tory Lamb, put heavy furniture and cabinets in place. There have been many others, and I am grateful for them all,” she said.
But there was only so much Dianne and her family could do on their own. “I went through six different crews during the renovation,” she said. “Some would work good for a while, but then, it either got too hard for them, or they’d find an easier job. This was all done during Covid-19, while the government paid people not to work. And some crews had to cut back, or they’d have to pay back the money they got during the shut-down.”
ABOVE Dianne visits with friends during her open house in November. The Cedar Crossing community turned out to see the labor of love that honored the history of the area. Many there had helped in some way during the restoration process.
In addition, prices “sky-rocketed. It was costing me about a third more for everything,” said Dianne. “Plumbers, electricians, insulators, and contractors all had to be booked months in advance. Then, whatever they needed had to be ordered at least four months in advance.”
When all was said in done, the 1903 house had new windows, new roof, an HVAC unit and ventilation, two new bathrooms, a full kitchen, foam insulation, new plumbing, and new septic system. Dianne also made a few additions: a laundry room, a sewing room, and a walk-in closet.
“Many a night, I sat in the bare rooms in the dark and wondered about the people who lived in the house,” said Dianne. “It has been an almost twoyear journey, and as you may can tell, somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the house.” She smiled. After the Open House event on November 12, for the Cedar Crossing community and other visitors to look at the finished work, Dianne and her husband moved from the big house across the field into their “new home.” It just made sense, she explained. “As my husband and I have gotten older, we didn’t want the expense and labor of keeping up that big house. So, we decided to make this our home,” she smiled.
In the sewing room lay remnants of fabric for her next quilt, an art she learned from her grandmother. “She always had a quit on the frame she was working on,” said Dianne. Every piece had once been a part of something whole. Instead of discarding what could no longer be of use, pieces of different colors, shapes, and designs were brought together to make something new.
From the screened-in porch, I could just make out what was left of H.J. Fowler’s country store on the corner. With a ceiling fan overhead, the porch is ready for another generation to share their stories.
ABOVE H.J. Fowler's Store belonged to Dianne's parents. She has memories of walking by her current home (seen in the background) on her way to her parent's store when she was a child.
Ironically, Dianne said, her eyes laughing, “I was born on a porch. Grandma said Mama went into labor and was out on the porch waiting for somebody to come by and help her. She had me before anybody could get there.”
In restoring this old house, Dianne preserved her own stories while also honoring the history of Cedar Crossing. With a vision for the future, she remembered the beauty before the neglect. Dianne was no longer the young girl who became a wife and mother at thirteen. She had earned two degrees and made a difference with her life as a counselor for the incarcerated.
It takes wisdom and real character to know which bridges to build and which to burn. To choose to walk away from things and people over which we have no control and yet hold to the people and the places we love. “In preserving this place, I remembered the little girl walking the road to her parent's store on the corner, visiting Ms. Pennye and Ms. Ethel with her grandmother,” said Dianne. “I pray they would be proud of the house and feel I did the old girl justice.” Never was justice so beautifully served.
Dianne remembers the old house having a picket fence and beautiful porch, so these were things she wanted to keep intact.
(Dianne and Louie Dees together have six children, thirteen grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.)
