Edward Ramsey (Headstone)
*Edward Burrell Ramsey was born on this date in 1852. He was a Black doctor.
A native of Hogansville, Georgia, he was the son of Ed and Frances Ramsey. His father was a mulatto man and a wealthy landowner in Troup County, where Hogansville is located. Ramsey was the second of eight sons and the only one his father sent to medical school. He graduated from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1880. The school had only been open for four years at that time.
When Edward returned home, he became the first Black doctor in Troup County, Georgia. He married Henrietta Southall, a native of Franklin, Tennessee, on May 23, 1881. He stayed in Hogansville for two years before moving to Texas, where he became the first Black doctor to practice medicine in Houston, TX. Edward had three children: Mollie Emma Ramsey, Gertrude Ramsey, and Felix Ramsey, who died in infancy.
Mollie Emma Ramsey married Dr. John Henry Jordan, the first black doctor in Coweta County, Georgia. Gertrude Ramsey married Joseph Randolph, who later became the first black president of Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina. While seeing patients in his office, Dr. Edward Ramsey had a heart attack on his 75th birthday. He died a day later, on November 6, 1927.
