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Francis Orray Ticknor (1822-1874)

Francis Ticknor

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.

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

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