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Ches McCartney’s Incredible Life

Wherever he went, he caused a stir, and he caused a commotion in Lincoln County, Georgia, as well. He looked like an Old Testament prophet with his long grey beard and tattered clothes. I doubt a more colorful character ever blessed the county with his presence.

His old iron-wheeled wagon hauled a teetering pile of garbage, lanterns, bedding, hay bales, clothes, potbelly stove, and scrap metal. The big handmade wagon, which clanked and rattled along with car tags from various states adorning its sides, looked like something the Darling family of “The Andy Griffith Show” might commandeer.

He traveled through the county in that rickety old wagon led by goats. An itinerant preacher, he was the legendary Goat Man. He rarely bathed, and you could smell him long before you got close to him. “The goats have taught me a lot in the past 30 years,” someone heard Charles “Ches” McCartney say, “They don’t, for example, care how I smell or how I look.” Goats were his passion. Sick and injured goats got to ride in his wagon. He was fond of saying “Everybody’s a goat; they just don’t know it.”

It was in the early ’60s, spring I believe, when he came through Lincoln County. We all piled into the car and headed out to Highway 378 where he had camped out. I remember being a bit uneasy around this bizarre character, his goats, and outlandish wagon. He was gathering wild onions and greens for a salad. He explained to my mom how he knew which plants to eat, and then milked a goat. That was my one Goat Man sighting.

“Ches” McCartney, the Goat Man, wandered the South for four decades. No writer could conjure up such a character. It’s not surprising that this eccentric vagabond inspired writers Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy to base characters on him. Darryl Patton wrote a book about him, America’s Goat Man and Duane Branam wrote a song about him, “The Legend.”

McCartney’s legend began July 6, 1901, in Sigourney, Iowa, though some disagreement attends 1901 as his birth year. At the age of 14, he ran away from his family’s farm. He married a Spanish knife thrower ten years his senior in New York and joined her act, serving as her nervous, quaking target. When she became pregnant they decided to farm for a living, but the Great Depression wiped them out. One day just before dawn, his knife-throwing, farming wife vamoosed. McCartney would marry at least two more times.

In 1935, an unbelievable experience changed McCartney’s life. He was working for the WPA cutting timber when a tree fell across his body. Several hours elapsed before he was found. Pronounced dead, he was taken to a morgue. Only when the mortician inserted an embalming needle in his arm did he awake. Of the experience McCartney said, “the undertaker was slow and by the time he got around to working on me, the life came back into my body and I regained consciousness. It was as if I had been raised from the dead.”

This startling escape from death infused him with religion and his spiritual awakening inspired him to hitch up the goats and spread the gospel. His wife made goatskin clothes for him to wear but quickly tired of her husband’s crusade and left him. (One account claims McCartney sold his wife to another farmer for $1,000.)

McCartney traveled the land with just two books: Robinson Crusoe, which inspired his wanderlust and the Bible. While spreading the Word, he lived off the land, handouts, and his goats. He sold postcards with his image on them for spending money.

This nomad roamed the South for four decades, making his way into Lincoln County at least once. Children of the ’60s far and wide remember this folk legend who provoked fear and awe and sadly invited violence. He was mugged more than once and in one instance the muggers killed two of his beloved goats.

For reasons unknown, this wayfaring minister settled in Twiggs County where he established the Free Thinking Christian Mission. From his mission base, he journeyed out with his goat-drawn wagon to preach his message of eternal damnation for sinners. You could trace his route through the countryside by the wooden signs he nailed to trees—“Prepare to Meet Thy God,” beneath which the fires of Hell burned.

A man of the cloth (He claimed to be ordained), he nonetheless had his foibles. In 1985, McCartney set out for California, hoping to meet the actress Morgan Fairchild whom he intended to woo and marry. Soon after he arrived in Los Angeles, muggers got him yet again and he had to be hospitalized.

He returned to Georgia and left the road for good in 1987, leaving a legend behind him.

After retiring from the road, McCartney and his son, Albert Gene, lived in a wooden shack without running water or electricity. When it burned, he and his son moved into a rusted old school bus.

In 1987, he entered a nursing home in Macon where he lived out his final years as a local celebrity, often wearing a Georgia Bulldog cap. In June 1998, someone shot his son to death in Twiggs County, a murder that remains unsolved. Less than six months after his son’s death, the Goat Man died in the Eastview Nursing Home on November 15, 1998. He claimed to be 106. While that may not be true, he led a life the likes of which we’ll never see again.

The Goat Man was something to behold. Seeing him rattling down the road was as iconic as seeing “See Rock City” atop a barn’s roof. He was a roadside attraction like no other, compelling people to get out of their cars and gawk. Old timers say it was way too easy spotting experienced Goat Man observers in a big crowd. They were the ones standing upwind.

The Goat Man website

1. Myra says:

   September 7, 2009 at 5:13 pm

   Tom,

   I remember The Goat Man! He hit Wilkes County and Washington on the same trip, I guess, but maybe a bit later in the 60s. I was in high school from 64-69 (eighth grade was HS then.) When he rolled into town (along highway 378), there would be traffic jams of people going by to look at him. And when he rolled past our high school on the way into or out of town, everything would come to a halt while we gawked at him! I think he came through more than once.

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2. Ken says:

   September 7, 2009 at 7:44 pm

   When I was in high school in Douglasville, ‘65-’69, the Goat Man came through town. Word of his approach spread through the town, so the crowd on Broad Street was worthy of a homecoming parade. He was truly one of a kind.

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3. Cliff Green says:

   September 7, 2009 at 8:11 pm

   Tom, I can remember The Goat Man stopping in Floyd County in the late 50s or early 60s. He put in for a few nights on Highway 27 just north of Rome. He sold his post cards, preached a little if someone would listen, then moved on withiut a trace.

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4. Keith Graham says:

   September 8, 2009 at 3:38 am

   A fascinating story. I remember the Goat Man, too. He used to make regular trips through Newton County, where my grandparents lived. I’ve heard different stories about why he stopped making the rounds. This is the most informed report I’ve seen.

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5. Billy Mallard says:

   September 8, 2009 at 7:24 am

   Lordy, Lordy, I wrote a story about the Goat Man for the AJC after he got mugged in LA. Talked to him by phone from the hospital, so I missed the full effect..

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6. Phillip Bellury says:

   September 8, 2009 at 8:22 am

   Before his infatuation with Morgan Fairchild, Chess had a crush on Mary Ann Mobley, the former Miss Georgia. In the mid-60s, my brother Mike lived at a remarkable roadside attraction near Savannah called the Dixie Jungle. The summer I visited him there, Goat Man was parked in front, hawking his postcards and preaching to travelers who slowed down to gawk at the scraggly-bearded old guy with crooked arm, overalls and his team of goats. If he wasn’t preaching, Chess was cursing the local police, who didn’t like the fact that he was burning old tires in a barrel, with black smoke billowing 100 feet into the air and drawing the curious from miles away.

   Mike had a real soft spot for Chess. From time to time, he would track him down and even brought him up to Macon once to be in his (second) wedding. Chess called him “Indian Boy” because Italian didn’t make sense to him. We visited him in Jeffersonville several times, and I dang near choked to death when we crawled up inside his little smoke-filled shack. His son, Gene, was still alive then, although he had bruises from being beaten by some locals who frequently harrassed them both.

   I have a ton of Goat Man stories, but some are just too incredible to believe. I’ll never forget watching him bathe himself with rubbing alcohol and then noticing that he replaced the bottle beside another bottle of alcohol that contained the skinned carcass of a squirrel. When I asked my brother what he was going to do with the squirrel, he just shook his head and said, “You don’t want to know.”

   The last time I saw Chess was in the nursing home in Macon, with his beard trimmed and wearing the cap. I didn’t recognize him, but I did detect the faint smell of alcohol.

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7. Tim Oliver says:

   September 8, 2009 at 9:16 am

   I remember him, too. Momma yelled at him for letting his goats come up in our yard, and munch on her freshly-planted centipede grass. Then, she gave him a sack of new potatoes. He was scarey, to us. I don’t remember him smelling, though.

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8. Geoff Baker says:

   September 8, 2009 at 10:18 am

   I remember seeing the Goat Man a couple of times pulled up on Alternate 19, Largo, Pinellas County, Florida in the late 50’s. He sure did get around.

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9. John Dembowski says:

   September 8, 2009 at 11:12 am

   How well I remember The Goat Man. As a boy, we would primitive camp at Lake Winfield Scott for w week during the summer (but that’s another story), and invariably would see him along the way to there or on the return trip.

   Many years later, while leaving Ocmulgee National Monument Indian Mounds in Macon, there was an old fellow at the gate, leaning on a cane, with his thumb out. I pulled up and threw open the door. His hands all gnarled by arthritis, he introduced himself, “I’m Ches McCartney.” On the way to his place, he told me how the UFOs were buzzing his donkeys, and how he was about to make “another” trip to the White House.

   I later thought about the sign I had passed while leaving the park, the old Creek Indian saying: “All things are connected.” Indeed!

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10. June Willis says:

    September 8, 2009 at 11:52 am

    I grew up in Macon, where the Goat Man often stopped. In the late thirties and early forties, I rermember seeing hiom and his string of goats. My mother, Rosemary Lyons Jones, was a writer, interested in “pixielated ” people and wrote about him in the Macon Telegraph. She was also a radio personality in Macon at WBML and I think she interviewed him there also. What a character he was!

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11. Marcia Proctor says:

    September 8, 2009 at 4:03 pm

    When I was growing up in NE Atlanta in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, my late father would drive us around at night, in search of “The Goat Man”, and he actually found Ches McCartney many nights. I have no idea how Daddy did that. My mental images of him are a distinct part of my childhood memories. Thank you for the story.

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12. Donna Underwood says:

    September 8, 2009 at 9:00 pm

    I saw the Goat Man when I was about seven or eight years old. We lived in Kentucky and traveled to South Carolina to see my grandparents. I remember so clearly going through the Smoky Mountains and seeing him on the side of a hill with his goats surrounding him. My Dad got very excited and told us to “Look at the Goat Man!” Thank goodness I did.

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13. Steve Krodman says:

    September 9, 2009 at 12:23 am

    Maybe it’s just synchronicity, but the Goat Man features prominently in the novel “A Trip of Goats” by Kim Crawford. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state right up front that Kim is a personal friend… but anyone who has ever encountered the Goat Man might enjoy his unusual look at life in 1960’s rural Georgia.

    http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/a-trip-of-goats/7304499

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14. K. Evans says:

    September 9, 2009 at 1:35 am

    It wasn’t until I was nearly “grown” that I was able to confirm that the goat man was real and not a figment of my childhood imagination, along with the boogey man and Soap Sally who would “wash you away” if you cried too much. He apparently came around quite regularly in Wilkinson County where I spent my first several years of life. And even though I probably last saw him before I started school, I do remember the, shall we say, aroma?

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15. Tom Caldwell says:

    September 10, 2009 at 12:04 pm

    Mention of the “Goat Man” brings back a flood of childhood memories. I was born in 1938 but don’t recall hearing of or seeing the Goat Man until after WWII. However, when he did pass through Rome he would usually camp overnight along the highway – US27, as I recall. Word would quickly spread through town of his arrival and place of encampment and my Dad, Mom and I would always make it a point of driving out for a visit, pictures, etc. It makes you wonder if the Goat Man would garner much interest today? I fear such simple pleasures of getting excited over something as simple as a “goat man” is lost to today’s generation. Pity.

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16. Julie says:

    March 10, 2010 at 9:57 am

    I remember the Goat Man. It was in the 1970’s after he ‘downsized’ to a pony cart pulled by a couple of goats. I lived on US 80 in Dry Branch, GA (yes – it’s a real community straddling Twiggs and Bibb counties). I frequently saw him making his trips from Jeffersonville to Macon and back (about 30 miles one-way). ‘Here comes the Goat Man!’ and all the kids would run to see him pass by on the 2-lane highway. They waved and he waved back. He was a sight! He bounced along and you could hear his bells long before you saw him. Although I don’t remember being close enough to smell him, I have heard that he did indeed smell bad. I saw him in his older years after he moved into the same nursing home as my grandma. He cleaned up right nice. I had no idea he was so famous outside of Middle Georgia. Thanks for the memories!

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