Charles Odingsell Screven

Charles Odingsell Screven (February 1773 – July 2, 1830) was a noted Baptist minister in the American South.

Life and career Screven was born in 1773 in Charleston, Province of South Carolina, to James Screven and Mary Esther Odingsell. His father was killed in 1778 during the Revolutionary War. Charles's great-great-grandfather, the Reverend William Screven, had been a Baptist minister in Kittery, Province of Maine, before moving to South Carolina.

He was baptized in Charleston in 1786 by Dr. Richard Furman.

Screven graduated from Brown University in 1795 and gained his license to preach in 1801. Around this time, he inherited the Retreat Plantation near Sunbury, Georgia, where he lived briefly. He was ordained in Charleston in 1804, again by Furman and also Edmund Botsford of Georgetown and Joseph Clay of Savannah, Georgia.

Screven married, firstly, Lucy Barnard Jones (one of his sons with whom was Reverend James O. Screven), in 1804; then, in 1813, his cousin, Barbara Galphin Holmes.

He developed a painful eye disease, which was diagnosed as cancer, in 1802, which led to his retirement from preaching in 1821. He was interred in Sunbury Cemetery in Sunbury.

Legacy In 1860, Screven was one of the subjects about whom William Buell Sprague wrote in his Annals of the American Pulpit: Baptist.