Okay so I resolved the problem myself by doing the following:
In Illuminate/Auth/EloquentUserProvider I changed the following lines:
45: return $this->createModel()->newQuery()->where('user_id','=',$identifier)->get()->first();
This is the way Laravel checks user login by ID for persistent logins. I had to change this to coincide with my OpenEdge Database.
98: return $query->get()->first();
For some reason the ODBC in conjunction with the OpenEdge database returns a collection of collections so I had to add "->get()" to this specifier where the username is checked against the database when logging in.
These two changes allowed me to make logins using my ODBC database, hope it helps whoever else tackles a OpenEdge database in conjunction with Laravel :)