John "Jack" Rhodes

John (Jack) Rhodes was born about 1761 in Union County, South Carolina, a short distance from the Savannah River which forms the border between South Carolina and Georgia. His parents were William Rhodes, Sr., born in Orange Co. Virginia and Elizabeth Wofford born in South Carolina. Jack was the oldest of eight children. He had a brother, Absalom, born in 1770, four sisters and two other brothers.

John Rhodes was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. Many battles were fought along the Savannah River. To encourage enlistments, the soldiers were promised bounty land in this frontier area when the war was over. This may have prompted the young man to enlist as a soldier

After the war was over he came home and married a daughter (first name unknown) of Capt. Lewis Bobo and his wife Sarah Solomon in 1786 or 1787 in Richmond Co. Georgia. They had two children Lewis Bobo Rhodes born 10 Mar 1788 and Biram Bobo Rhodes born 1792-1796 in Union Co., South Carolina .The mother of these children died before 1796. {

The name 'Bobo is a possible abstraction of the french name "Beaubea" or Beaubeau'. ]

That same year John (Jack) Rhodes married Mary (Polly) Bobo the daughter of Lewis and Sarah Bobo in South Carolina. They had four daughters and then one son. Sarah 1798, Permelia 1800, Martha 1802, Meremia 1804, and Hiram 1804..  Shortly after Hiram’s birth they moved to Hephzibah (later called Bedford), Georgia.  

John was a miller, one of the most important men in a Colonial town. This occupation refers to a person who operates a mill, a machine to grind a cereal crop to make flour. The most basic tool for a miller was a large fixed stone as a base and another moveable stone operated by hand or by a water wheel behind a dam. This mill was known as the Rhodes Mill. In time the flood waters came and washed the dam away, leaving a beautiful inland body of water known as the Rhodes Mill pond.

John died in Georgia 6 Jan 1808 and was buried in the Bedford, Richmond, Georgia cemetery. His wife Mary and her children returned to South Carolina. In Georgia she turned over the guardianship of Biram in 1812 to her brother Kindred Bobo who lived in South Carolina. John’s oldest son Lewis stayed in Georgia. Mary died in 1815 and was buried in the Rhodes Cemetery in Bedford, Georgia. In her will she named her children but did not mention the two older children of her husband. However there was a note left stating that Biram was the orphan child of her husband John Rhodes.

 In frontier settlements there was always a great need for someone to build and operate a mill to grind their corn into flour.  In “The Story of My Old Community” the historian Walter A. Clark writes: “During my boyhood days Saturday was always “mill day” at the old homestead.  If a rainy day occurred during the week it was utilized in shelling from the glistening ears that lay heaped in the old log crib with the usual turn of corn. On Saturday Peter or Joe would take it over to the old Rhodes mill, where under the skillful manipulation of UNCLE JACK RHODES, it would be transformed into the softest and whitest and purest of meal. The memory of its sweetness and its wholesomeness as it comes back to me today has prompted and inspired this unpretending tribute to this old time mill that furnished us the staff of life for nearly 40 years.” 

Our family have the records of Dicy Rhodes Little and William (Billy) Rhodes who came to Utah in 1889 to supply much of this information. It proved the connection between the Rhodes family in Georgia and the Utah branch. We are fortunate to have an ancestral cousin Walter A. Clark who was a 19th century historian in Georgia, who wrote a detailed history “The Lost Arcadia, The Story of My Old Community,” to Nelson Osgood Rhodes who published the book “The Rhodes Family of America,” to Jack Ladson of Moultrie, Georgia, a cousin who corresponded with the family and gave them the ancestral line of this family back to 1600 in England