Benjamin Franklin Eaves

Benjamin Franklin Eaves (1870-1953) was a pioneer horse and buggy medical doctor in Haralson County, Georgia.

Eaves was also a farmer, and an owner of large amount of acreage in the Draketown area of Haralson County.

Once Pank's father told him to plow a field of stubble, but he was not to burn it off because it would kill the young apple orchard.

He and his older brother, Taylor, walked from Rockmart, Georgia, to the Tobe Eaves farm on weekends.

Eaves entered medical college for Physicians and Surgeons in Atlanta, Georgia, now Emory University.

He had been dissecting corpses that were obtained from the city when people were killed on the street and could not be identified.

Hearing the janitor coming down the hall, he jumped on a dissecting table, covered himself with the white sheet like a corpse.

[2] When Eaves started his office, he bought a road cart, better known as a "gully jumper" and a brown Morgan horse named Maude.

It had been said he made quite a good impression on the ladies flying over the red hills in this gully jumper with his black sideburns, wearing a hard top derby hat.

He treated typhoid fever, pneumonia, measles, whooping cough, sore toes, lanced boils, set broken bones, pellagra, delivered inestimable babies (many by cesarean section), removed fingers, hands, legs, tonsils, pulled teeth, and most any ailment when his patients needed his services.

People in the communities of Carroll, Paulding, Haralson, and Polk counties came from miles around for his advice and services.

[9] In the year of 1910, Eaves put the faithful old horse, Maude, out to pasture and bought his first automobile, a Maxwell.

In 1918, during World War One, he said he had visited as many as forty homes in a day and night where whole families were ill with influenza.

[10][11] The men had gotten together, and after ingesting some "liquid courage", had driven to the Parsonage in Draketown to try to kidnap her husband.

Along with Dr. William Love Hogue, he examined Mrs. Stewart and determined that she needed to be rushed to Emory hospital in Atlanta.

While Mrs. Stewart's husband left her side to search for the rum runners who shot his wife, Eaves stayed with her for two days.

Mrs. Stewart never recovered enough to have life saving surgery and died two days later from respiratory paralysis.