Website for Joseph Kitchens, Author and Historian

My Georgia

My family settled on Georgia’s frontier more than 200 years ago. So, I am inspired by family memories, especially my mother’s rich stories of small- town life during the Depression and her life as the young wife of a construction engineer, living in dozens of towns and cities’

Here, I will share my reactions to books, old and new, that have shaped my understanding, revisit childhood memories, and share my life’s work in a career that included many years as a university history professor at Georgia Southwestern State, as executive director of the legendary Pebble Hill Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia and as the first head of the Funk Heritage Center and Bennett History Museum ( “Georgia’s Official Frontier and Native American Interpretive Center”) at Reinhardt University, all of which inspired in-depth study and reflection on the story of my beloved Georgia.

 I hope readers will help me uncover forgotten history in “God’s Smallest Places,” stories of how history has impacted ordinary people. I will retrieve some of these “lost” or little-known stories and I hope to share some of yours. I am currently researching how smalltown Georgia’s emerging middle class was virtually destroyed in the mid-nineteen twenties when cotton prices collapsed and a corrupt banking scheme devastated many local economies- a phenomenon that has gone largely unstudied by other historians. I need readers’ help in locating family stories, as well as privately held papers and letters that may offer insights into how families experienced this collapse.

The mid-twenties saw the beginning of the end for hundreds of small towns, leaving broken dreams and abandoned streetscapes across much of the state. The sun is still going down on many of them today, including the all-but-abandoned town of Gough in Burke County where I was born. As political, social and financial power has become concentrated in the Atlanta metropolitan area, much of the rest of the state has been left behind with failing schools, hospitals and lost career opportunities for the next generation. I hope readers will share how their smalltowns are coping and how they believe this trend might be reversed.

Some of my writing fits into the category of “life writing” based on memories and life experiences. My short story “Going Home on the Nancy Hanks” was winner of the Fleming Prize for short fiction in 2020.

Watch for dog stories if dogs are your passion. We currently share our home with Emily, a beautiful lab mix which we discovered in a rescue sanctuary near Brunswick, Georgia -a long way from our home in the “Marble Capital of Georgia,” Tate.

I am a frequent speaker to historical and heritage groups. If you would like a program on Georgia History, Native Americans in Georgia or related subjects, contact me at gajoe42@gmail.com.