Fodice

Fodice, a farming community off U.S. Highway 287 four miles west of Pennington in southern Houston County, was established after the Civil War. Some sources maintain that the town's name came from "four dice," a favorite game of the early inhabitants. Other sources suggest that the first settlers came from the Arkansas community of Fordyce, from which "Fodice" was derived. In 1875 a Methodist church was founded there, and around 1886 a public school began operating. The community had a post office from 1902 to 1966. By 1914 Fodice had two general stores, a cotton gin, a gristmill, and a Masonic hall. During the 1920s and the mid-1930s it had a church, cemetery, and school. Its estimated population in 1936 was twenty-five. After World War II the Fodice school was closed, but by the mid-1970s the community's population increased to nearly fifty. In the early 1990s Fodice was a dispersed rural community with a church, a cemetery, and a number of scattered houses. Most of the area's residents were black. The community's reported population in 1990 and again in 2000 was forty-nine.