Who's Who of Crow Creek Valley

Dr. George E. Bogart

Born: 1883
Place of Birth: Bass, Ala.
Died: 1949, Sherwood, Tenn.
Burial: Stevenson, Ala.
Last place of residence: Sherwood
Mother: Nancy
Father: William Bogart
Spouse: Lynda Mason (m. 1913)
Other information:

Bigraphical sketch by Dan Hardison

The sixth of eight children, George E. Bogart was born in Bass, Alabama in 1883. His father, William Bogart, was a traveling eyeglass salesman when he came to Alabama and began working in a general store in Bass. He would later move his wife Nancy and their family to Stevenson, Alabama where he opened his own general store.

George followed his older brother Billy to Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine in Nashville. After graduation from Vanderbilt, George moved to Sherwood to setup practice. In 1913 he married Lynda Mason. He was the only doctor in Sherwood and would remain there the rest of his life.

Dr. Bogart died in 1949 at the age of 66. He was buried in Stevenson, Alabama. After his death, Father George W. Jones wrote these words in tribute:

“Our doctor died. He, George Elbert Bogart, just sighting the threshold of old age, was too young to die. We have seen saints on this earth among all classes of men. Priests and clergymen have not always predominated. We are almost certain physicians have.

“Our doctor enhanced the certainty. For with inevitable human imperfections, he was able and good, and very kind and great. He was a scholar with a poet's heart and a gentleman. Not once in 20 years of intimacy did he offend our fastidious taste with so much as one risque word.

“He gave his life to general practice in Sherwood – while most loved him and praised him and some disparaged as great men are often disparaged. He did major operations on kitchen tables by the light of oil lamps. He sometimes definitely risked his own life with men mad with mountain whiskey to save the life of another. He loved the host of children he delivered into the world. And he assuaged unbearable suffering. It is ironical that our doctor who saved so many, at the end had to suffer some years of torturing illness that might well have unbalanced his integrity, and unable to save himself untimely died.

“We saw him baptized and we saw him confirmed with Linda, his wife. His faith in God was implicit. Being a scholar he reasoned, but being a saint his faith was a child's faith, his obedience to Holy Church a child’s, and his prayers sincerely simple to the end.

“And now our doctor is somewhere in life immortal. We like to think that being a physician he has exchanged experiences with St. Luke, and being a fisherman has, with St. Peter, gone a fishing. The fallible human, the Great Fisherman, the First Vicar, the Keeper of the Keys, and Our Doctor Fisherman, gone a fishing in the Realm of Glory. Why not?”


O George, our friend, our doctor.
May the soil rest lightly upon your body
till resurrection.
And may you in light perpetual,
in God's love and service,
grow on, in peace.
For thus ever have the fallible sons of God
gone onward
from works to reward.

— Father George W. Jones