My Genealogy Hound

James J. Mayes, a prominent and successful farmer of Broughton Township, is the subject of the present sketch, and was born in Oglethorpe County, Ga., on June 26, 1818. His parents, James and Sarah Mayes, were both Southerners by birth, the former being a native of South Carolina, the latter of Georgia, and James was the only child born to them. Mr. and Mrs. Mayes died while James was an infant, leaving him to an uncle to raise, educate and care for. With this uncle the subject of this sketch lived until his eighteenth year, and owing to the fact that his youth was passed on a farm, his education was rather limited. He married Miss Sarah J. Young, of Georgia, in 1841, a daughter of John T. and Mary (Booker) Young. Mr. and Mrs. Mayes are the parents of thirteen children, of whom the following are now living: John G., Rebecca (wife of T. J. Lavender, a farmer near Prescott), Sarah C. (widow of Charles J. Bowmann), Cornelia (Mrs. J. C. Kelley), Alabama (Mrs. John Cathey), and William W. Mr. Mayes moved from Georgia to Alabama in 1855, and the following year located in Columbia County, in the State of Arkansas, and after one year passed there settled in Nevada County, where he has continued to live up to the present time, and where he owns 240 acres of valuable farming land, well improved and managed in a most systematic and successful way, and including an excellent fruit orchard, which yields a good income in itself. The subject of the sketch served in the late war, enlisting in 1864, under Capt. Polk. He is a member of the Masonic order, and a deacon in the Baptist Church, of which his wife is also a member.