On October 5, 1863, Major McLemore, sent from Atlanta to round up a growing number of deserters hiding in the swamps of Jones County under Newt Knight, sat in the home of Amos Deason, where Knight slipped up under cover of darkness and shot and killed him as he sat before the fireplace. After the siege of Vicksburg, desertion had swelled, and Jones County entered a personal civil war in which Knight and his company fought the Confederacy and drew women, children, and slaves into deadly skirmishes that often reached their homes. Accounts cited from Ethel Knight's Echo of the Black Horn and Victoria Bynum's The Free State of Jones present differing tones but include murder and theft by Knight and his followers, while Confederates also raided homes for food and horses. Many poor people in Jones County, believing the Civil War was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, wanted freedom from Rebels, from Knight and his deserters, and from Yankees. The Amos Deason Home, built circa 1845 by Amos and Eleanor Deason and known locally as the Old Anderson home, is the oldest standing structure in Jones County. Though its exterior appears to be masonry, it is actually hand-hewn planks made to resemble stone, with a Greek Revival front entrance and wrap-around porch, and it was the first house in Jones County to be painted. Its importance rests especially in the events before and during the Civil War: anti-secessionist sentiment was strong enough that J D. Powell was elected to represent Ellisville in Jackson, though he ultimately voted to secede, and Amos Deason declared his home neutral territory and open to everyone. Major McLemore stayed there when he came to pursue Knight's band, and later legend held that the blood stain on the heart pine floor reappeared in damp weather and that McLemore's ghost walked the house at night. Before 1900, Deason's grandson Isaac Anderson moved into the house with his wife Sarah Rebecca Pool, and they raised ten children there. One son, A. D. Anderson, opened the Nehi Bottling Company in Ellisville in 1926, and another, I. R. Anderson, owned several sawmills, the Ford Motor Company in Laurel, and what is now known as Laurel Oil, parent Company of this Shell Station/General Store.