Francis Orray Ticknor
American physician and poet
Francis Orray Ticknor (November 13, 1822 – December 18, 1874) was an American medical doctor and poet. From the state of Georgia, he became known as a war poet ("Georgia's Confederate Poet"), mostly through the fame he acquired with the ballad Little Giffen.
Biography
Francis Orray Ticknor was born on November 13, 1822, in Fortville, Georgia, the youngest of three children born to Harriot Coolidge and Orray Ticknor. His parents came from Connecticut, where his father, Orray Ticknor, was a doctor. Orray Ticknor moved to Savannah, Georgia, in 1815, and married Harriot Coolidge, whose family had moved from Connecticut to Georgia around 1800. The family moved to Fortville, where they raised a family.
At age 13, Ticknor left for Pennsylvania where he attended a boys school, and then the Philadelphia College of Medicine (later Gettysburg College) where he got his degree in medicine in 1842. In 1844 he started a practice as a country doctor in Shell Creek, Georgia, a very quiet and rural place where Ticknor found himself missing the social life of bigger towns, though his practice seems to have thrived. He married his wife Rosalie Nelson in 1847. They had eight children (two of them died young) and moved to Columbus, on a hill called Torch Hill and a house named for the hill.
The public source identifies “Francis Orray Ticknor” as american physician and poet. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Francis, Orray and Ticknor.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q52149779. VIAF identifies the subject as 14607869. The Library of Congress control number is nr00011345. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1822, 1874, 1815 and 1800.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francis Orray Ticknor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.