History of the John Hunt Family From the Beginning

There is a little town 15 miles from Ozark and 12 miles from Headland, Alabama.   The crossroads between those two cities is a town named Echo. 

            My great grandfather, Dr. John Hunt, came from England with his father, mother and two brothers.  One of the brothers settled in North Carolina, one in Texas, and the third, Dr. John Hunt, settled in Echo and founded this little crossroad community around the year 1880.

             There were three stores in that crossroads town.  One store stood on each of the three corners.  One was a hardware and lumber store; the other two were grocery and dry goods stores.  Back in those days, a grocery store would carry everything needed for a country family, including overalls, dresses, cloth, sewing materials, and all kinds of supplies as well as canned goods, crackers and big barrels that contained items sold by the pound, and all other goods needed for a farming area. 

Echo had a population of about 300 people with a radius of 5 miles.  It consisted of several nice, small farms, a beautiful white church that was non-denominational that everyone attended, a cemetery, and a one-room schoolhouse that went up to the fourth grade.  This schoolhouse did not have rooms, but curtains for privacy that separated the building into four rooms.  This is where I started first grade. 

There was also a Masonic Lodge, a two-story white framed building which my grandfather, Dr. John Hunt, founded and served as the first Potentate.  His picture still hangs in the lodge today, after all these years.  The little schoolhouse, a church, three stores, a lodge, and a few houses scattered within a mile of each other, and approximately 20 houses within a five mile area made up this little place called Echo.