Come Father’s Day once again, and I often find myself reflecting on the times in which my father grew to manhood. It serves as a reference point in assessing my own efforts and failures. I have written many stories featuring my father, and here I pull together what I know about my him before I came of age. This is a reprint of the first of three articles I wrote for this site in 2023, tracing my father’s early life growing up in “God’s Smallest Place.”

In My Father’s Time, Part One

22.06.2021 / JOSEPH KITCHENS / DEEP SOUTH STORIES, UNCATEGORIZED

I suppose many of my generation remember our fathers from young childhood experiences, but our fathers often disappear from memory for a time afterwards, lost in the demanding world of work and career. If we are lucky, he comes into focus again as we reach adolescence, the point in time when we are expected -by some miracle- to become men ourselves, hopefully under the tutelage of our fathers This is the point in time when we receive our first hunting rifle, our first wrist watch or our first driving lessons. But, few of my generation actually knew much about our father’s life away from home, much less could we have imagined how the great forces of history shaped, even constricted, their lives. Because my father never spoke to me much about his life “out there” in a world seemingly unrelated to our daily lives at home, I have spent a good bit of time trying to place my father in his own milieu. This journey has turned out to be less about ancestry and more about how historical events disrupted his life and restricted his choices. In the end, his life was shaped by events -tragic and momentous- that were beyond his control.

My father and I were born in the same century but in vastly different worlds. His life began as new worlds of medicine, engineering and unimagined prosperity were dawning. But the South into which he was born would not share the advantages of these new panaceas in his lifetime. The Civil War ended as my father’s grandparents were coming of age. They were landholders without labor caught in a seemingly downward spiral of sharecropping, indebtedness and isolation. They subdivided their lands, most of which were eventually auctioned off at the court house door. They began developing a new town when a railroad was laid alongside their lands in the opening decade of the twentieth century.

Then, out of the blue in in the 1910’s, salvation arrived when new European markets opened as a result of the build up to World War I. The outbreak of that war in 1914 war made most of the belligerent nations -in one way or another — dependent on American products. Steel, oil and machinery were at a premium, and so was cotton. It became “king” again. My grandfather, White, backed by his father-in-law’s endeavors in farming and cotton ginning, threw in his lot with other family members to create a corporation that would include three small-town banks and a dry goods business. He lived in Gough , Georgia. Never heard of it? It was never even incorporated.

White was chosen Chief Cashier and later President of the Bank of Gough. As long as cotton was needed for military uniforms, equipment and munitions (it was mixed with gunpowder to make the explosive “cordite”), things went very well. Evidence of this surge of prosperity linked to cotton can be found in almost every small town in Georgia in the out-sized classical revival homes built among the aging Victorian and modest “story-book cottages” in small and middling towns. They were meant to equate the newly prosperous with the cotton aristocracy of the old South. Today they often survive as funeral homes. This affluence at last ushered in the age of automobiles and tractors in rural Georgia.

Evidence of this new prosperity withered after the war. While the country-especially its urban centers- burgeoned in the 1920’s, the “New South” prophesied by newspaper pundits, Rotarians and the local Chambers of Commerce, all of which had sprouted like mushrooms following a thunderstorm, withered. And it was not the Boll Weevil that did this.

The plague that ruined the southern farm economy was the inflated cost of doing business. As corporate America burgeoned with new industries, especially those associated with automobiles (tires, service stations, electrical components, gasoline) and fashionable new home appliances (refrigerators and washing machines for example), sales on credit drove up interest rates. Money on loan fed the lucrative consumer market, not Southern farmers. Cotton farmers in particular, could not function without credit. It takes virtually the entire year to raise a cotton crop and credit was the key to doing it. Share cropping and farm tenancy exploded (though both had been common enough befoe the Civil War).

Small banks that served the farmers needs collapsed at an astonishing rate. In the summer of 1926, one hundred and ten banks in Georgia and Florida failed. In these two sates loans and returns were reciprical and served the needs of both states and often belonged to partnerships that allowed cash to be moved between the two sates seasonally. The collapse of the Florida real esate boom was in part because Georgia banks had loaned their reserves out to cotton farmers and there was no reserve to bail out their Florida partners. Lax federal regulation of banks made matters even worse. Comparative figures for bank closures and arrests for illegal practices(code for bankers absconding with the cash) seems to have been very high, at least in Florida.

Beginning in the mid-twenties, more than two and a half million people would leave the cotton belt of the deep South, lured by the prospects of employment in the steel mills and automotive assembly plants in the North. The hundreds of small southern crossroads towns spawned by the railroads began to dry up. An era of small town life was ending.

The automobile powered a social revolution in the twenties. People found employment in town, even if they might choose to live in the country. Beyond the deep South, parts of the country boomed. Florida flowered like the proverbial tropical garden it was. South Florida real estate boomed and suddenly between the fabulous profits to be made in Florida lands and the promise of the Stock Market, people who had once considered even banks too risky, were “all in” to try their hand at investment capitalism.

White Kitchens did the logical thing. His only real business experience was in banking and real estate development. He moved to Florida. White found a cashier’s position in the newly formed Bank of Port City (a suburb f Tampa). The bank’s president was a Tampa construction contractor and Hillsborough County commissioner, James G. Yeates. How the men knew each other is a mystery. But the bank’s Vice President seems to have come from Jefferson County, Georgia near White’s home in adjacent Burke County. It has occured to me that because of the proximity of Florida to Georgia, perhaps many of those who migrated to Florida in the early twenties were Georgian fleeing the shrinking economy of Georgia. Tracking this is difficult because the Florida Bust occured between the federal censuses of 1920 and 1930. Did many Georgia immigrants move back to Georgia afterward? Except for anecdotal information indicating that they did. Statistical proof is not easitly compiled.

Tampa, where White relocated his family, was a boom town on Florida’s Gulf Coast. His three young boys must have thought they had been transported to paradise. The city had streetcars, they were moving heaven and earth with giant steam shovels, man-made islands were rising in Tampa Bay, five story buildings were springing up. The canals that drained the once swampy real estate created new land for investment and a water playground for young boys.

Automobiles were everywhere and White’s boss, James Yeats, was busy promoting the idea of a grand memorial highway to connect Tampa with Miami and the Atlantic Coast. Ships came into the harbor from everywhere in the western hemisphere and beyond. Street hawkers sandwiched in sign boards and even the newspaper boys were selling real estate futures. A railroad was being completed along the entire east coast of Florida. There were real schools, not the makeshift sort found in the rural South. And, Hugh’s father had a promising job.

Hugh’s mother, Tressie, made sure her sons were enrolled and even paid for the boys to take after-school classes in music and art. Their father, White, was, after all, cashier in one of the newer banks. I feel certain she missed her sisters (who had married country sisters back in Georgia), but she must have felt liberated by the glamour and social life of Tampa. This splendid opportunity only last a mere fifteen months.

Overnight, the bottom fell out. I am not speaking of the stock market crash of 1929. The bottom fell out of the Florida construction and real estate boom precipitously beginning in July 1926. A shipping accident paralyzed Miami’s harbor. The great railroad on the east coast was slammed by a terrible hurricane. The infra structure that would have provided for the tens of thousands of people flowing south across the Georgia-Florida line simply collapsed. Gasoline shipments fell to a trickle, service stations closed. Stranded people from all over camped on the roadsides, their cars useless. Lots that had sold in the thousands days earlier were now worthless. The bank where White worked closed its doors, unable to either pay its creditors or force repayment of its loans. White and Tressie had no reserve to fall back on. The only thing they owned was their tiny home back in Gough, Georgia and a new Buick automobile. They left by train bringing their Buick with them, its hand- made, wooden spoke wheels and gleaming chrome a sad reminder of the reversal in their affairs . The Buick seems to have ended up in a local tractor garage in Gough, and where the owner repurposed it as a wrecker. It was still in use when I went off to college in 1960.

The Kitchenses arrived back in Georgia a bit before calamity would strike once again. In October of 1929, the financial horror that had blanketed the deep South became nationwide when the New York Stock Exchange imploded. Rural Georgia hardly noticed the difference. Even many of those wealthy or successful enough to have held on to this point, now went under. White found work selling fertilizer on commission (sharing a job description with Georgia’s multi-term governor, the red-suspendered champion of the rednecks, Gene Talmadge, a.k.a. “The Wild man from Sugar Creek”).

The boys and their well-bred mother, Tressie, came back to a Georgia where school attendance was declining, jobs were almost non-existent, teachers were paid in “script” or promisory notes and the KKK pulled the strings of a political system dominated by demagogues who in turn rested on the shoulders of the votes of the rural poor. But it was the rich who paid the way for the demagogues to stay in power.

In Gough, there was no electricity, no electric lights, Yellow Fever was a very real possibility and health care was provided by a slender corps of country doctors. They also found themselves broke when their patients could not pay in cash. Armed with little but penicillin to fight disease, they were forced to accept payment in barter. And, it allowed some doctors to remain in the rural south where they were badly needed.

My father, Hugh, graduated from nearby Waynesboro High school at 17 in 1934. He was regarded throughout the extended family as the brightest of the boys (according to him) -though his report cards suggest he was not very studious. He aspired to be a physician or an engineer. Who knows at seventeen? His parents could not afford to send him to college.

Hugh’s uncle, a local physician (married to his mother’s sister) was the town doctor. He offered to pay Hugh’s way to the University of Georgia. How could he have afforded to do this? It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that he (like many other physicians) wrote prescriptions for grain alcohol. Prohibition in the form of the Volstead Act, was the law making it illegal to sell whisky and other alcoholic beverages. People who were too desperate or too irreligious to care what their Methodist neighbors thought about “taking a nip” could always buy “moonshine” from the local bootleggers, or make their own. Polite society required more secrecy. Aging widows and arthritic farmers developed ailments that required visits to the doctor. As before prohibition, alcohol was found to be efficacious in the treatment of these ill-defined maladies. Their doctors were often broke and willing to oblige -for a fee. At any rate, there was little therapy or legal medication the doctors could offer.

After graduating from nearby Waynesboro High (May 27, 1934), my father, Hugh, departed for the University of Georgia, an institution governed by a legislature that was hamstrung by primitive religious beliefs and tormented by politicians who garnered votes by feeding the biases of the rural and largely uneducated. Come election time, candidates often stoked the notion that UGA was godless, claiming its science departments were bastions of teachings about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In college they said, Georgia’s brightest young people were being tainted by the idea that man was descended from apes. Hugh, some family members feared, was heading for a pit of debauchery. For his parents, White and Tressie, it was their best hope for his future. No one could have foreseen the tragedies that history held in store for Hugh’s generation.

If you are interested in the decline of small town life and the effect that the First World War and Great Depression had on East central Georgia, check out the earlier story about the founding of Gough, which is in Burke County.

The Sun is Going Down on Gough, Georgia (Part 1)

Note: I have in my hand the program for the graduation at Waynesboro High. I thought it might be of interest to Burke County families to know the members of the class. They are listed here:

Billy Black, Ed Byne, Louis Carpenter, Morton Fulcher, Perry Herrington, Floyd Humphery, Hugh Kitchens, Frank McNorrill, Bobby Palmer, William Rustin, Roundtree Sessions, Roy Simmons, Raymond Stewart, Robert Thompson, Annie Bates, Virginia Blunt, Elva Butler, Margaret Butler, Florrie Daniel, Mary Godbee, Barbara Gray, TeCoah Harner, Virginia Hudson (Hugh’s cousin and daughter of Dr. and Mrs. J.H. Hudson of Gough), Frances Kendrick, Alice McClelland, Emma Miller, Bessie Newton, Natalie Steadman, Annie Stephens, Evelyn Ward, Lois Whittle. It is suggestive that these names, mostly of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish origins, reflect the fact that Georgia was settled mostly by families from the colonies and states to her north, Virginia and the Carolinas.

In My Father’s Time, Part One

22.06.2021 / JOSEPH KITCHENS / DEEP SOUTH STORIES, UNCATEGORIZED

I suppose many of my generation remember our fathers from young childhood experiences, but our fathers often disappear from memory for a time afterwards, lost in the demanding world of work and career. If we are lucky, he comes into focus again as we reach adolescence, the point in time when we are expected -by some miracle- to become men ourselves, hopefully under the tutelage of our fathers This is the point in time when we receive our first hunting rifle, our first wrist watch or our first driving lessons. But, few of my generation actually knew much about our father’s life away from home, much less could we have imagined how the great forces of history shaped, even constricted, their lives. Because my father never spoke to me much about his life “out there” in a world seemingly unrelated to our daily lives at home, I have spent a good bit of time trying to place my father in his own milieu. This journey has turned out to be less about ancestry and more about how historical events disrupted his life and restricted his choices. In the end, his life was shaped by events -tragic and momentous- that were beyond his control.

My father and I were born in the same century but in vastly different worlds. His life began as medicine, engineering and unimagined prosperity were dawning. But the South into which he was born would not share the advantages of these new panaceas in his lifetime. The Civil War ended as my father’s grandparents were coming of age. They were landholders without labor caught in a seemingly a downward spiral of sharecropping, indebtedness and isolation. They subdivided their lands, most of which were eventually auctioned off at the court house door. They began developing a new town when a railroad was laid alongside their lands in the opening decade of the twentieth century.

Then, out of the blue in in the 1910’s, salvation arrived when new European markets opened as a result of the build up to World War I. The outbreak of that war in 1914 war made most of the belligerent nations -in one way or another — dependent on American products. Steel, oil and machinary were at a premium, and so was cotton. It became “king” again. My grandfather, White, backed by his father-in-law’s endeavors in farming and ginning cotton, threw in his lot with other family members to create a corporation that would include three small-town banks and a dry goods business in Gough , Georgia. Never heard of it? It was never even incorporated.

White was chosen Chief Cashier and later President of the Bank of Gough. As long as cotton was needed for military uniforms, equipment and munitions (it was mixed with gunpowder to make the explosive “cordite”), things went very well. Evidence of this surge of prosperity linked to cotton can be found in almost every small town in Georgia in the out-sized classical revival homes built among the aging Victorian and modest “story-book cottages” in small and middling towns. They were meant to equate the newly prosperous with the cotton aristocracy of the old South. Today they often survive as funeral homes. This affluence at last ushered in the age of automobiles and tractors in rural Georgia.

Evidence of this new prosperity withered after the war. While the country-especially its urban centers- burgeoned in the 1920’s, the “New South” prophesied by newspaper pundits, Rotarians and the local Chambers of Commerce, all of which had sprouted like mushrooms following a thunderstorm, withered. And it was not the Boll Weevil that did this.

The plague that ruined the southern farm economy was the inflated cost of doing business. As corporate America burgeoned with new industries, especially those associated with automobiles (tires, service stations, electrical components, gasoline) and fashionable new home appliances (refrigerators and washing machines for example), sales on credit drove up interest rates. Money on loan fed the lucrative consumer market, not Southern farmers. Cotton farmers in particular, could not function without credit. It takes virtually the entire year to raise a cotton crop and credit was the key to doing it. Share cropping and farm tenancy exploded (though both had been common enough befoe the Civil War).

Small banks that served the farmers needs collapsed at an astonishing rate. In the summer of 1926, one hundred and ten banks in Georgia and Florida failed. In these two sates loans and returns were reciprical and served the needs of both states and often belonged to partnerships that allowed cash to be moved between the two sates seasonally. The collapse of the Florida real esate boom was in part because Georgia banks had loaned their reserves out to cotton farmers and there was no reserve to bail out their Florida partners. Lax federal regulation of banks made matters even worse. Comparative figures for bank closures and arrests for illegal practices(code for bankers absconding with the cash) seems to have been very high, at least in Florida.

Beginning in the mid-twenties, more than two and a half million people would leave the cotton belt of the deep South, lured by the prospects of employment in the steel mills and automotive assembly plants in the North. The hundreds of small southern crossroads towns spawned by the railroads began to dry up. An era of small town life was ending.

The automobile powered a social revolution in the twenties. People found employment in town, even if they might choose to live in the country. Beyond the deep South, parts of the country boomed. Florida flowered like the proverbial tropical garden it was. South Florida real estate boomed and suddenly between the fabulous profits to be made in Florida lands and the promise of the Stock Market, people who had once considered even banks too risky, were “all in” to try their hand at investment capitalism.

White Kitchens did the logical thing. His only real business experience was in banking and real estate development. He moved to Florida. White found a cashier’s position in the newly formed Bank of Port City (a suburb f Tampa). The bank’s president was a Tampa construction contractor and Hillsborough County commissioner, James G. Yeates. How the men knew each other is a mystery. But the bank’s Vice President seems to have come from Jefferson County, Georgia near White’s home in adjacent Burke County. It has occured to me that because of the proximity of Florida to Georgia, perhaps many of those who migrated to Florida in the early twenties were Georgian fleeing the shrinking economy of Georgia. Tracking this is difficult because the Florida Bust occured between the federal censuses of 1920 and 1930. Did many Georgia immigrants move back to Georgia afterward? Except for anecdotal information indicating that they did. Statistical proof is not easitly compiled.

Tampa, where White relocated his family, was a boom town on Florida’s Gulf Coast. His three young boys must have thought they had been transported to paradise. The city had streetcars, they were moving heaven and earth with giant steam shovels, man-made islands were rising in Tampa Bay, five story buildings were springing up. The canals that drained the once swampy real estate created new land for investment and a water playground for young boys.

Automobiles were everywhere and White’s boss, James Yeats, was busy promoting the idea of a grand memorial highway to connect Tampa with Miami and the Atlantic Coast. Ships came into the harbor from everywhere in the western hemisphere and beyond. Street hawkers sandwiched in sign boards and even the newspaper boys were selling real estate futures. A railroad was being completed along the entire east coast of Florida. There were real schools, not the makeshift sort found in the rural South. And, Hugh’s father had a promising job.

Mother, Tressie, made sure her sons were enrolled and even paid for the boys to take after-school classes in music and art. Their father, White, was, after all, cashier in one of the newer banks. I feel certain she missed her sisters (who had married country sisters back in Georgia), but she must have felt liberated by the glamour and social life of Tampa. This splendid opportunity only last a mere fifteen months.

Overnight, the bottom fell out. I am not speaking of the stock market crash of 1929. The bottom fell out of the Florida construction and real estate boom precipitously beginning in July 1926. A shipping accident paralyzed Miami’s harbor. The great railroad on the east coast was slammed by a terrible hurricane. The infra structure that would have provided for the tens of thousands of people flowing south across the Georgia-Florida line simply collapsed. Gasoline shipments fell to a trickle, service stations closed. Stranded people from all over camped on the roadsides, their cars useless. Lots that had sold in the thousands days earlier were now worthless. The bank where White worked closed its doors, unable to either pay its creditors or force repayment of its loans. White and Tressie had no reserve to fall back on. The only thing they owned was their tiny home back in Gough, Georgia and a new Buick automobile. They left by train bringing their Buick with them, its hand- made, wooden spoke wheels and gleaming chrome a sad reminder of the reversal in their affairs . The Buick seems to have ended up in a local tractor garage in Gough, and where the owner repurposed it as a wrecker. It was still in use when I went off to college in 1960.

The Kitchenses arrived back in Georgia a bit before calamity would strike once again. In October of 1929, the financial horror that had blanketed the deep South became nationwide when the New York Stock Exchange imploded. Rural Georgia hardly noticed the difference. Even many of those wealthy or successful enough to have held on to this point, now went under. White found work selling fertilizer on commission (sharing a job description with Georgia’s multi-term governor, the red-suspendered champion of the rednecks, Gene Talmadge, a.k.a. “The Wild man from Sugar Creek”).

The boys and their well-bred mother, Tressie, came back to a Georgia where school attendance was declining, jobs were almost non-existent, teachers were paid in “script” or promisory notes and the KKK pulled the strings of a political system dominated by demagogues who in turn rested on the shoulders of the votes of the rural poor. But it was the rich who paid the way for the demagogues to stay in power.

In Gough, there was no electricity, no electric lights, Yellow Fever was a very real possibility and health care was provided by a slender corps of country doctors. They also found themselves broke when their patients could not pay in cash. Armed with little but penicillin to fight disease, they were forced to accept payment in barter. And, it allowed some doctors to remain in the rural south where they were badly needed.

My father, Hugh, graduated from nearby Waynesboro High school at 17 in 1934. He was regarded throughout the extended family as the brightest of the boys (according to him) -though his report cards suggest he was not very studious. He aspired to be a physician or an engineer. Who knows at seventeen? His parents could not afford to send him to college.

Hugh’s uncle, a local physician (married to his mother’s sister) was the town doctor. He offered to pay Hugh’s way to the University of Georgia. How could he have afforded to do this? It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that he (like many other physicians) wrote prescriptions for grain alcohol. Prohibition in the form of the Volstead Act, was the law making it illegal to sell whisky and other alcoholic beverages. People who were too desperate or too irreligious to care what their Methodist neighbors thought about “taking a nip” could always buy “moonshine” from the local bootleggers, or make their own. Polite society required more secrecy. Aging widows and arthritic farmers developed ailments that required visits to the doctor. As before prohibition, alcohol was found to be efficacious in the treatment of these ill-defined maladies. Their doctors were often broke and willing to oblige -for a fee. At any rate, there was little therapy or legal medication the doctors could offer.

After graduating from nearby Waynesboro High (May 27, 1934), my father, Hugh, departed for the University of Georgia, an institution governed by a board that was hampered by primitive religious beliefs and tormented by politicians who garnered votes by wailing to the local papers that UGA was godless and claiming its science departments were bastions of teachings about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In college they said, Georgia’s brightest young people were being tainted by the idea that man was descended from apes. Hugh, some family members feared, was heading for a pit of debauchery. For his parents, White and Tressie, it was their best hope for his future. No one could have foreseen the tragedies that history held in store for Hugh’s generation.

If you are interested in the decline of small town life and the effect that the First World War and Great Depression had on East central Georgia, check out the earlier story about the founding of Gough, which is in Burke County.

The Sun is Going Down on Gough, Georgia (Part 1)

Note: I have in my hand the program for the graduation at Waynesboro High. I thought it might be of interest to Burke County families to know the members of the class. They are listed here:

Billy Black, Ed Byne, Louis Carpenter, Morton Fulcher, Perry Herrington, Floyd Humphery, Hugh Kitchens, Frank McNorrill, Bobby Palmer, William Rustin, Roundtree Sessions, Roy Simmons, Raymond Stewart, Robert Thompson, Annie Bates, Virginia Blunt, Elva Butler, Margaret Butler, Florrie Daniel, Mary Godbee, Barbara Gray, TeCoah Harner, Virginia Hudson (Hugh’s cousin and daughter of Dr. and Mrs. J.H. Hudson of Gough), Frances Kendrick, Alice McClelland, Emma Miller, Bessie Newton, Natalie Steadman, Annie Stephens, Evelyn Ward, Lois Whittle. It is suggestive that these names, mostly of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish origins, reflect the fact that Georgia was settled mostly by families from the colonies and states to her north, Virginia and the Carolinas.