Dedgar and the gang are off to the grave of Francis Orray Ticknor, right across the border in Columbus, Georgia. If someone would like to come read his famous poem, "Little Giffen," please make a comment here.
Physician, poet, and horticulturist,
Francis Orray Ticknor wrote memorable Civil War (1861-65) poetry and
earned a lasting literary
reputation on the merit of a single poem, "Little Giffen," a ballad
about a young Tennessee soldier named Isaac Newton Giffen.
The poem describes how during the war Ticknor treated and
befriended the wounded Confederate lad, only to see him return to
the ranks and presumably to his battlefield death.
Francis "Frank" Orray Ticknor, the youngest of
Harriot Coolidge and Orray Ticknor's three children, was born in
Fortville,
in Jones
County. He earned a medical degree from the Philadelphia College of
Medicine, in Pennsylvania, in 1842 and began his practice in
rural Shell Creek, Georgia. He married Rosalie "Rosa" Nelson in
1847 and settled at Torch Hill, their home in Columbus.
They had eight children.
The country doctor published poetry and horticultural
articles in numerous periodicals, especially the Southern Cultivator.
"Little Giffen" first appeared in November 1867 in The Land We Love,
a Charlotte, North Carolina, magazine. Two collections of his poetry
were published posthumously. In 1879 Kate Mason Rowland
edited and southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne wrote the
introduction for The Poems of Frank O. Ticknor, M. D. An expanded
edition, The Poems of Francis Orray Ticknor, edited by Ticknor's
granddaughter, Michelle Cutliff Ticknor, appeared in 1911. In addition
to his popular southern martial
poetry, the collections include memorial and religious poems,
humorous verses, and songs about home and nature.
Ticknor died in Columbus and was buried in Linwood
Cemetery. The Georgia
Historical Commission has placed a marker at the site of Torch
Hill.
Suggested Reading
Sarah
Cheney, "Francis Orray Ticknor," Georgia Historical Quarterly 22
(summer 1938): 138-59.
Charles Stephen Gurr, "Social Leadership and the
Medical Profession in Antebellum Georgia" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Georgia,
1973).
Annie Belle Rodgers, "Francis Orray Ticknor: Georgia
Poet" (master's thesis, University of Georgia, 1928).
Michelle Cutliff Ticknor, ed., The Poems of
Francis Orray Ticknor (New York: Neale Publishing, 1911).
Joy Hughes Mallard, Atlanta
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-477&hl=y
