Redux: Mitchell and Warm Springs; A Link Between Two Small Georgia Towns and President Roosevelt

This is a republishing of my earlier post about the links between two small Georgia towns, links that include a distant relative who helped bring Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Warm Springs in the 1920’s. It is the most viewed post on my website. This is a remarkable connection which I continue to research. (You might also want to read the related story about Tom Loyless who played a role in getting FDR to Warm Springs. Before buying the inn at Warm Springs, Loyless was a newspaper editor who fought a bitter battle with both the KKK and Tom Watson over the trial of Leo Frank who was convicted of murdering an Atlanta factory girl named Mary Phagan. It remains the most famous murder case in Georgia History.) (https://longleafjournal.com/thomas-wesley-loyless-fighting-editor-friend-of-fdr/).

I am a subscriber to Brian Brown”s wonderful photo blog, Vanishing Georgia (https://vanishinggeorgia.com/) . If you feel affection for small town life, especially as expressed through its architecture, you will become addicted to this site with its well- organized and searchable data base.

Brian ‘s photographs are mainly of the farm houses and buildings that are “stranded” in the country, typically farm and plantation houses, as well as barns, churches, and country stores. Because most National Register designations are “districts” within older towns, memory of the rural architecture in Georgia is much more in danger of vanishing without recorded images. So, Brian’s soulful documentary pictures have great value from the perspective of rural cultural history. I travel much less than Brian (who is also a writer and poet), so I hope my occasional photographs of small-town street scenes in some small way will compliment his much more expansive site.

I thought my readers. as well as Brian’s, might enjoy seeing this photo of Mitchell, Georgia taken a decade ago. This little town in Glascock County, Georgia, bears a resemblance to so many of the small railroad crossroads and farming communities that have been in decline roughly since automobiles became commonplace and the great migration from the rural South beginning in the mid-1920’s.

The town of Mitchell in Glascock County Georgia is the town is where my great-great- grandparents, Bose and Nancy Harrison Kitchens, lived. Bose has the distinction of having been shot and killed by a nephew of his wife at a church picnic in 1870. It is a complicated story, difficult to research. Rumor has it that the nephew acted on provocation, was exonerated by his church deacons, but convicted in court. He supposedly escaped to Texas. Suffice it to say, the Kitchens were thick on the ground and in the cemeteries of this small town.

The community is remarkable for a variety of reasons. It is not far from the old road into the Creek Nation and the famous naturalist William Bartram passed through the area with a survey party out of Augusta shortly after the Revolution. Like many who settled the region along the Ogeechee River frontier, my Kitchens ancestors came from North Carolina after the American Revolution. Strongly Baptist and disdainful of authority, they flocked to the call for volunteers when the Civil War erupted in 1861.

Glascock County supplied a company of soldiers to the 22nd Georgia Infantry, one of the storied Georgia regiments to serve in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Thirteen of the men who served were members of the Kitchens family. Only five reportedly came home. The 22nd, part of Wright’s Brigade, spearheaded the attack on the Union center at Gettysburg on July 2nd, 1863. More than half the regiment was killed, wounded or captured in an action that might have turned the tide of battle. And, the 22nd Georgia was with General Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

Bose and Nancy Harrison Kitchens produced several sons who became long- serving physicians in the region, including Dr. Bose Kitchens who practiced in the community for over fifty years and who is memorialized in the little museum housed in the old railroad station. Another of Bose Kitchens sons, Neal Kitchens, became a physician specializing in water therapy and lived in Warm Springs during his later years. It was he, along with Tom Loyless (who owned the inn at Warm Springs), who enticed future President Franklin Roosevelt to Warm Springs to determine if the springs might help him regain his strength after suffering a debilitating case of polio

When I arrived in Mitchell for the first time, I stopped at the town’s museum which was housed in the small railway station. The building was lovingly restored for this purpose. It was closed, but I saw a flagpole across the street and a lady sitting on her porch. She walked out to greet me and introduced herself as a Etta Wilcher. She asked me if I was a “Kitchens” before I could introduce myself. I was surprised when she said we all looked alike. She took me into the museum which featured many photos of the illustrious Dr. Bose Kitchens, as well as relics from the town’s agricultural and military history. She also explained why the stores were not open. They were not open on any regular basis, but they were maintained in good condition by owners to honor their much loved parents and ancestors who had built the town of Mitchell.