For reasons I cannot explain, this has been the most popular of all my 150 or so posts over the past three years. It is a simple story that includes a shoot out at a church picnic, a relative small town doctor who influenced a president, and a family dynasty of country doctors.

Mitchell and Warm Springs: A Link Between Two Small Georgia Towns

I am a subscriber to Brian Brown”s wonderful photo blog, Vanishing Georgia . If you have a soft spot 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 barn, churches and country stores. Because most National Register designations are “districts” within older towns, it architecture the rural architecture of Georgia that 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 stories of small-town life will in some small way compliment his much more expansive site.

This photo of Mitchell, Georgia (above) in Glascock County was taken a decade ago. This little town in east central Georgia bears resemblance to so many of the railroad and crossroads farming communities that have been in decline roughly since automobiles became commonplace and the “Great Migration” from the rural South began in the 1920’s.

This is the town in which my great-great- grandparents, Bose and Nancy Harrison Kitchens, lived and near where their ancestor’s pioneered in the 1790’s along Rocky Comfort Creek and the Ogeechee River. It is not far from the old state capital in Louisville or the old Federal Road into the Muscogee Indian lands. 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, a common sanctuary for those who ran afoul of the law in the Reconstruction era. His side of the story is not available to us, but I have found myself imagining that Bose had too much too drink and stirred up an argument that ended in the killing. Nancy divorced him about this time, which I find suggestive. More on this in a future article. Suffice it to say, the Kitchens were thick on the ground and in the cemeteries of this small town.

Like many who settled the region along the Ogeechee River frontier, my Kitchens ancestors came from North Carolina’s Tar River section. Fond of drink 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 General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Thirteen of the men who served were members of the Kitchens family. Several of Bose Sr.’s sons were among these. Only five reportedly came home. The 22nd, part of Ambrose Wright’s “Georgia 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 the war. For a brief moment, they apparently broke through the Union defensive positions, but found their position threatened on both sides and were forced to withdraw. . On the following day Picket’s Charge on the same positions -reinforced overnight- ended in disaster. The 22nd Georgia was with General Lee throughout the remainder of the war and 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.

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 apprehensive) when she said we all looked alike. She had the key in her pocket and took my brother Jack and 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. Mrs. Wilcher 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.

Another 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 German Kaiser and his military and even gave speeches at Columbus civic clubs on the need to punish the Germans for their war crimes.

Dr. Neal Kitchens, an avid hunter and fisherman, genealogist and gardener, retired from his Columbus practice to settle nearby Bullochville, 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.” 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 influence Dr. Kitchens had on FDR’s decision to come to Warm Springs is difficult to define from a historical point of view, but in the stream of life it must have been one of the many factors 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.

The Kitchens were fond of entertaining the press corps that was posted to Warm Springs during the president’s stays there. In the post war years, , the elderly Dr. Neal Kitchens enjoyed a wide reputation as the “Magnolia Man of Warm Springs.” He grew these beautiful tree blossoms around his home and would take them to the nurses and staff at the Warm Springs Institute.

Kitchens claimed that it was he who convinced FDR to reenter politics. Again, it is easy to dismiss such a claim,. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it assuredly suggests that Kitchens was devoted to the young man who had come to Warm Springs to rebuild his shattered health.

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.