Mitchell, Georgia Main Street, ca. 2010. Photo by Joe Kitchens.

I am a subscriber to Brian Brown”s wonderful photo blog, Vanishing South Georgia . 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 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 1920’s.

This is the town in which 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. His side of the story is not available to us, but I have found myself imagining that Bose had too much too drink and precipitated an argument that ended in the killing. Nancy divorced him about this time, which I find suggestive. More on this another time. 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. 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 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.

This marker at Gettysburg Battlefield recalls the triumph and disaster of Wright’s Brigade on the second day at Gettsburg. Glascock County men made up a company in the 22nd Georgia Regiment. A survivor recalled how they overran the federal center and were forced to retreat under devastating conditions, losing more than half their men as killed, wounded or captured.

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 satation.

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 (maybe a little discouraged) 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.

Dr. and Mrs. Bose Kitchens. He served the Glascock County area for 52 years (d. 1942). From the Mitchell Museum.

One of the senior Bose’s sons, Dr. Cyrus White Kitchens, was also a physician and seems to have practiced for at least as long in Wrens and neighboring small towns as his brother, Bose, in Mitchell. My own grandfather was named for him. One of the elder Bose’s grandsons was also a physician, Dr. Thomas Neal Kitchens (his mother was a Neal). A popular and successful physician, he practiced in Columbus, Georgia for many years. During World War I, and in his fifties, Neal joined the Red Cross medical services and spent several months in a Paris hospital for American wounded. He came home bitter toward the Kaiser and his military and even gave speeches at Columbus civic clubs on the need to punish the Germans for their war crimes.

Mitchell Museum. With the author and his labrador “Peachie” is Mrs. Etta Wilcher, poses . Mrs. Wilcher was a knowledgeable and generous hostess.

Dr. Neal Kitchens, an avid hunter and fisherman, genealogist and gardener, left Columbus to settle in rural Bullockville, Georgia. He and his wife were welcomed into the social life of the small town, one not unlike the Mitchell of his youth. He was elected mayor and led the effort to rename the town “Warm Springs.” This was easily approved by the state legislature because the town was originally named for the Reconstruction Republican governor. Dr. Kitchens was a well- known figure in Warm Springs and worked to encourage the use of the spring and its resort for medicinal purposes.

As a medical student, Dr. Kitchens specialized in a then-popular course of study in hydrotherapy. Remember, although there is a preventative vaccine, there was -and is-no cure for polio. But, water therapy held some health benefits in relieving pain and stiffness, and provided the great satisfaction of making polio patients lighter and more mobile in the water, a psychological benefit, one that proved powerful in helping patients recover their confidence and emotional health. It had this effect on a young New York politician who had been stricken in his late thirties- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Whatever Dr. Kitchens’ influence may have been is difficult to assess from a historical point of view, but in the stream of life it must have been one of the many that encouraged the future president to invest in the community, to organize the Warm Springs Foundation and to initiate structured therapy for polio sufferers. Roosevelt would develop a kinship with the wealthy cottagers at Warm Springs, as well as with the depression-ravaged farmers nearby. His experience at Warm Springs definitely inspired the President’s careful reflection on farm issues, as well as his New Deal programs designed to help his neighbors.

It would be easy to dismiss these connections as hopeless nostalgia, but that would belie the fact that the community of Mitchell is still alive and that intelligent, hard working and passionate people are determined to preserve this setting until history comes ’round again to confer recognition on this small but important birthplace and home to so many, a positive fate it would then share with Warm Springs.