Bank of Gough was on left side

Elegy for a Vanishing Town

(A Work in Progress, Seeking Your Help)

The sun is going down on many towns in the south. I was born in one: Gough, one of Georgia’s vanishing towns. Before vacant cotton fields afforded an opportunity for drug runners to land their planes nearby, before southerners all but abandoned travel by rail, before family farms became tree farms and cattle ranches, before farmers were embarrassed to say they worked in a shirt factory or cotton mill, and before the Second World War, the occupation of Japan and the Korean War introduced southern men and women to the bigger world of travel, education and jobs in the city, Gough was a thriving place.

The town was laid out by a group  of developers called the Gough Land and Improvement Company in September 1905, looking for opportunities sure to follow the completion of a new railroad, the Augusta and Florida. By that time, the road was open from Keysville to Midville and linked the Augusta Southern line in the north with the Central of Georgia in the south. Along this route sprang up Keysville, Saint Clair, Gough, and Vidette, towns whose history and fate would be shared. Almost overnight they were all linked by rail to Augusta, Savannah, Macon, Atlanta and to all the traffic that passed through those cities on the eastern and gulf seaboards.

Roads to Waynesboro (to the east) and Louisville (to the west) converged along the new railroad.  It seemed a promising location for a town. Railroad mileage as well as passenger service in Georgia peaked about 1920 and by then many spur lines had been built to carry lumber, cotton and passengers. But trouble lay ahead. Passenger service would decline after automobiles became commonplace in the 1920’s. The demand for cotton would boom before and during the coming war in Europe, but post-war inflation would make borrowing against next year’s cotton crop too expensive, supported as it was by an almost feudal system of tenant farming and sharecropping.

Newspaper ads from the period tell of free rail transportation for a special opening- day sale of business and home lots to be held in Gough on November 14, 15 and 16, 1905, promising a brass band and free barbecue. The ad said the new town was in the heart of the richest agricultural lands in the state and situated on the highest, driest point on the new rail line.  A new bank had been capitalized by investors-or nearly so. An oil mill, guano plant, and cotton gin were said to be in the works. Burke County pledged $200 toward the construction of a school building for Gough’s children. An artesian well was being drilled for community needs. A public park had been laid out and would soon boast a bandstand. A concrete plant would be opening in January 1906., employing 50-75 people. The developers seemed to be promising the moon.

I cannot say my ancestors founded the place. But I think my grandfather, White Kitchens, and his father -in-law, Isaac  Jackson Gay, had a hand in it.  My grandparents-paternal and maternal- made their homes there. My mother’s father, Calvin Sego (1901-1979), once told me that the town got its name from a “Gough family” that lived nearby. Perhaps it was “McGough,” because I seem to recall that name appearing in a cemetery near Gough along the road to Waynesboro.

I do not want to make this about only my own families, but their stories live on in my memory and should be written down. This may encourage others to do the same, adding to what I hope will be a growing story-so please bear with me. And, add your own comments, which I will credit to you if you like-but I reserve the right to edit what you submit. I am, after all, the editor of my own website.

My father’s parents were what might be called the “upper crust” (a pejorative for slightly better off than some of their neighbors), since both Cyrus White Kitchens (1888-1960) and his bride, Tressie Gay, came from relatively prosperous families. The Gay’s were a farming, cotton-ginning and saw- milling family in both Burke and neighboring Jefferson County, with many hundreds of acres, most of which became almost worthless after the crash in the cotton market in the early 1920s. 

Tressie’s father, Isaac Jackson Gay (1854-1922) and his wife Ellen Ponder Davis Gay (1878-1914) are buried at Ways Baptist Church in Jefferson County. They built homes for their daughters, two of whom married medical doctors and settled in Vidette and Waynesboro, and for a third, Tressie,whose husband, White, was about to establish a bank in Gough.

White and Tressie had three boys, a smokehouse, an outside privy (as well as an indoor bathroom) and a fine looking, if small, house. I recall it was nicely furnished with French- inspired beds and dressers, boasted a “modern” kitchen with red and white décor, factory-made metal cabinets (over and under) and a matching tubular chrome dinette suite. Framed prints of scenes popular in the period when the house was built, as well as watercolors painted by my father as a boy decorated the walls.   Painted white, the house had a metal roof painted red, lead paint no doubt. It was an easy walk to White’s bank, the first brick building in town.

Until my grandfather White died, a Black woman named “Minnie” was the maid and cook. A petite woman with long wavy hair that was usually tied up in a cotton turban, Minnie had little to say, except when she and I were alone. She talked mostly about mundane things -the weather, what movie was playing in nearby Waynesboro, things appropriate for child-adult conversation.

In later life, after my grandmother Tressie suffered a stroke and was in the nursing home in Keysville, Minnie was provided with a small bedroom and bath on the back of the house, a space created by enclosing the original sleeping porch. I was more comfortable around Minnie than with my grandmother Tressie because Tressie was so scrupulous about cleanliness and neatness. For example, she insisted I use the privy in warm weather and during daylight hours.

Tressie was an aristocratic woman with dark hair going to gray and in her mid- fifties at the time I was in grade school. I knew her only from occasional Christmas and other holiday visits. She had obvious expectations of a better life. When I was six she gave me a necktie for Christmas, hand painted in the art-deco style with lightening bolts and gears. It was red, too, like the roof. Unfortunately, she suffered from a stroke and was paralyzed on one side,and tragically lost her ability to speak. She spent the last thirteen years of he life an invalid living in a nursing home. Medicine offered little help for stroke victims in those days.

Tressie’s sister, Nina, married Gough’s only physician, Dr. Joseph Hudson. He delivered both my parents and delivered me as well. Nina’s and Tressie’s sister, who we called “Auntie,” (pronounced Ahn-tee) married Dr. W.C. McCarver who practiced in nearby Vidette. Many doctors were practicing in small farm villages in those days. It is said that they may even have prospered during Prohibition because they could prescribe alcohol for “patients” who could pay-a practice known as the doctor-and-pharmacy trade.

Keep in mind that medicine had not advanced much beyond smallpox vaccinations, penicillin for infections, stiches for cuts and the setting of broken bones. Preventative health care was little practiced and the world was full of patent medicine “nostrums” and fake cures. The active life required in farm communities could prove dangerous-especially when railroads, tractors and automobiles were added to the mix. “General Practice” was exactly that in those days-the town doctor did it all.

My grandmother Carrie’s kitchen cabinet held many bottles of patented medicines, but also a box of empty capsules to be filled from a nearby  package of quinine used to ward off malaria. Mosquito-borne diseases were still a problem in the swampy regions of Georgia’s coastal plain, even as late as the 1940s. Should I mention the gnat problem? Perhaps later. Many readers will have gnat stories to recount.

White Kitchens had a new building constructed in Gough. On one side was his bank, the other and larger part was to be rented out as a store or office. The Bank of Gough occupied the left side (as viewed from the street), and various businesses have occupied the right half over the past hundred years.  In my memory, these have included a service station, a pool hall and a restaurant.) It is still standing.

My father, Hugh, and his brothers Billie and Buster, grew up in the twenties and thirties hunting and fishing, playing sandlot baseball and (in my father’ case at least) taking art lessons. Tressie inherited land from her father and White always kept a boat, duck boots, shotguns and fishing rods on hand. In those days, most country people did the same. I was lucky enough to grow up enjoying the outdoors when wild quail were common and there seemed to be a mill pond on every creek, good for bream and bass fishing.

White grew up in nearby Davisboro (Washington County) in the household of his grandparents, James H. Jackson and Martha A. Franklin.  White’s mother (James and Martha’s daughter), Ellen Schly Jackson, died in childbirth when White was ten. According to my mother, this left White an isolated child unable to express his emotions easily. He was seldom affectionate, but always dutiful in sending a check on birthdays and when I graduated from high school. I purchased a sports coat with the money. Many of the boys pictured in my 1960 school annual appear wearing that jacket.

White’s father, William Harrison Kitchens (1858-1938) managed the Jackson’s sizable farm—formerly a plantation in the years before the Civil War. About 1793, the Kitchens family, immigrants from England to Isle-of-Wight, Virginia, joined the general migration into the Tar River Valley of North Carolina, and then came to the Georgia frontier after the American Revolution. They settled in Wilkes County, Georgia. but the counties were divided up repeatedly, and the home site is now in Glascock County. There, the Kitchens name is still well- recognized, featured in the small museum housed in their old railroad station.

Two of White Kitchens’ uncles were medical doctors , and his cousin, Dr. Thomas Neil Kitchens, who grew up in Mitchell, was among the founders of the Warm Springs Institute, where President Franklin Roosevelt underwent rehabilitation after contracting polio. So, the Kitchens and Gay families produced or married many physicians. Dr. Boze Kitchens of Mitchell practiced for more than 50 years. Dr. Cyrus White Kitchens, also of Mitchell, practiced in Wrens and had business and family ties in Davisboro.  Their family networks extended all through central east Georgia. Naturally, my father hoped to become a doctor, but the Great Depression wrecked that plan.

White and Tressie’s futures were destroyed overnight, along with those of countless southerners, Black and white. When the cotton boom ended in the years following World War I, it was largely because inflation made credit too expensive to continue farming cotton-especially for sharecroppers and tenant farmers and those landowners who were dependent on sharecroppers. The availability of credit and low interest rates had made the system possible. Higher rates destroyed it. Hundreds of banks throughout the south’s cotton-planting regions collapsed.

As I describe in my review of Dr. William Rawlings’ book A Killing on Ring Jaw Bluff, the collapse set off by rising interest rates triggered a “Great Migration” from the South to industrial and commercial centers in the  North and Midwest. The population of Burke County declined from 30,165 in 1900 to 19,349 in 1980. Much less acknowldged by historians, this migration also saw heavy migration by rural Blacks into southern cities and towns.

It is still widely believed that the boll weevil infestation wiped out cotton. Actually, farmers learned quickly some effective measures to control the insect’s destruction. In my story “Arminta’s Quilt” I show how my great grandmother Arminta Wright, a widow, organized her sizable brood of children into a brigade armed with tiny mops and marched them into her cotton fields to wipe a concoction of arsenic suspended in molasses on the cotton bolls. It killed the weevils and saved her crop.

Burke County farmers were faced with credit problems, labor shortages and the rising costs of cotton production. And now there was the necessity of buying a tractor. Logically, many chose to diversify. They turned to pecan, peach and soybean production.

White and Tressie loaded their possessions in a box car and boarded the train for Tampa, Florida where White had found a job in a bank. They were just in time for the Florida real estate boom to go bust. They returned to Gough in 1926 with their three little boys in tow. The Great Depression was waiting in the wings for their return. White took a job at the Waynesboro Gin Company. The gin’s cotton weigh station he operated for decades is still there. Times were hard. For White and Tressie, they never got better.

Dear Reader:

Let’s call this the first draft and first chapter of an oral history of Gough. Help me by adding your own stories or those passed down by family and friends. Waynesboro, Vidette, Keysville, and St. Clair, as well as nearby larger towns like Louisville, Wrens, and Sandersville are near Gough and of course the people in those towns would likely have had social, church or school friends from Gough. In many ways this is about Georgia’s heartland-its cotton country, its original counties, witnesses to an exploitative plantation system, the scene of Revolutionary and Civil War conflicts, all shaping the souls of generations to come.

I am undertaking this to honor my mother, Mamie Seago Kitchens (1921-2012), Miss Burke County of 1938.She is buried in Vidette Cemetery. More than a hundred members of her family, chidhood friends, several high school classmates, and one of her teachers attended her funeral. She came back to be among her own ones. I am painfully aware of how few Black acquaintances I had in Gough. It would be a valuable contribution if new Black friends felt comfortable with adding to these stories. Though our stories may at time seem to be very different, our families shared the same time and stage for generations. Human affections often grow in unlikely soil and despite cruel surroundings.