Memory Hill Cemetery

More Information

Tomlinson Fort, MD

Jul 14, 1787 - May 11, 1859

West Side, Section E, Lot 52, Grave 10
-- See section's Lot Layout map
-- or see section's Grave Location map.

Latitude: 33.07492550, Longitude: -83.22963305 -- See location on Google map.

Inscription and Notes:

b. Warren Co., GA, d. Milledgeville.
Practiced medicine for 36 yrs.
Government Service.
Military Service: War of 1812
Wounded. U.S. Congressman

Dr. Tomlinson Fort

Dr. Tomlinson Fort was born in Wilkes County, Georgia, on July 14, 1787. He was the son of Arthur Fort and Susanna Tomlinson Whitehead Fort.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical College for one year but did not receive a degree. He began practicing medicine in Milledgeville in 1810 and practiced medicine for thirty-six years. He was granted an honorary doctor's degree by the medical college at Augusta, which he helped to establish.

Having organized his own company, the Baldwin Volunteers, he served in the War of 1812, and was wounded in Florida at the battle of "Twelve Miles Swamp". For the next fifty years he suffered at intervals from a musket shot in the leg. Many stories are told of his bravery in battle, but none of greater fortitude than when, over 70 years of age, without anesthesia, he directed the hand of his son, George, in a successful operation to remove the long embedded ball from his knee (Union Recorder 1940).

Between 1819 and 1825, Dr. Fort represented Baldwin County in the state legislature and, from 1827-1829, in the United States House of Representatives. He served as mayor of Milledgeville for three terms. For thirty years he was the physician for the state penitentiary. He was in charge of the Central Bank of Milledgeville, at that time the most important banking institution of the state, and badly in debt, he left its credit clear. For twenty-seven years he was a trustee of the University of Georgia.

He was involved in the establishment of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum to which he gave his professional services as a trustee and a physician. He wrote a book containing the best-known medical treatments of the day, A Dissertation on the Practice of Medicine, published in 1849, available for sale as a reprint (1999 edition) at the Mary Vinson Memorial Library.

He married Martha Low Fannin on October 28, 1824. They had 13 children. Dr. Fort died in Milledgeville on May 11, 1859.


See others in this cemetery lot.