For nearly 40 years, the sound and smell announced the arrival of the goat cart to each community along Charles “Ches” McCartney’s travels.

Before people saw him, they heard the bleating of a dozen or so billys and nannys, coupled with the clanking of old chairs, tires and license plates piled high on the wagon. The odor, of course, came from the goats and the man who traveled with them by day and slept among them at night.

McCartney was known across Alabama and the South as the Goat Man after he traded the life of a carnival worker for that of an entrepreneurial wanderer in the 1930s.

Until his retirement in 1969, he made the loop from Iowa to Georgia and on to Jacksonville, Fla., where he spent the winter months, making a living by accepting donations for his occasional preaching and for photos people took of him and his goats.

McCartney, born in Iowa circa-1901, inadvertently became a folk legend, meeting presidents and appearing on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”

Artist Larry Martin of Alabama met McCartney in the late 1970s, when he drew the Goat Man to create one of his most popular art prints. (Click here for details on ordering prints from Martin.) The two remained friends until McCartney’s 1998 death.

“I found him really likable,” Martin said. “He was a true eccentric; he was just as colorful as fictitious legends like Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan.”

The making of the Goat Man

Historical accounts debate McCartney’s early history – even his birthdate is in question. Although several newspaper accounts and his headstone give his birth year as 1901, other historians and Larry Martin believe he may have been born as early as 1895, which would have made him 103 at the time of his death.

A 1969 article in the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune states McCartney said he’d been married three times and had children with each wife.

McCartney said he was married at age 14 to a woman who was 24-years-old. He was a runaway who was selling newspapers on a corner in New York; she was a Spanish knife thrower. He decided the couple and their new baby boy should take the act on the road with McCartney serving as the human target. Eventually, mother and son decided to stay behind and McCartney returned to his travels.

Martin said McCartney was forced from his Iowa farm after losing much of his livestock during the Depression. “He had an old wagon so he fixed it up and hit the road,” Martin said. “He decided to do the vagabond life. Once he made his first trip with the goats and the wagon, he found something in the vagabond life he really liked so he just continued to do it.”

Donations of food and money from kind and curious people along his route were enough to feed McCartney and his goats, Martin said. “There was not very much overhead in that lifestyle,” he said. “He drank goat milk quite a bit and the goats would eat anything, so it was low maintenance.”

In the late 1960s, McCartney retired from the road. He and his son, Gene, then grown, lived together in a converted school bus near Jeffersonville, Ga.

In the winter of 1998, McCartney’s son Gene was found shot to death in an abandoned school bus in Twiggs County, Ga., that had been used as a home by the father and son.

The murder remains unsolved. On Nov. 15, 1998, McCartney died in a Macon, Ga., nursing home. His obituary in The New York Times read: “Whatever the scope of his travels, Mr. McCartney, who averaged seven miles a day and had a regular route between Iowa and Georgia, spent most of his time creating traffic jams throughout the South, primarily along the old Dixie Highway running through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.” McCartney is buried in the city cemetery in Jeffersonville, Ga.

Meeting the Goat Man

Whenever McCartney was spotted on a road leading to one of numerous small towns, parents gathered their children and loaded them into the backs of trucks and station wagons to visit the man many of them had visited when they were children themselves.

A visit with the Goat Man passed as family entertainment at a time when television was new and limited, and children still preferred being outdoors.

Rock Prose, who now lives in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, saw the Goat Man when he was growing up in Bessemer, Ala.

“I remember my mother grabbing me and throwing me in the car, saying, ‘The goat man’s here! We’re going to see the goat man!’ Apparently, Bessemer was one of his occasional stops, and my mother remembered being taken by her father to see him when she was young, so off we went,” Prose said. “He was camped on the outskirts of town and there was quite a crowd there already when we arrived. I got to meet him and shake his hand and I carried the awful smell of goats for a while afterward.”

For one little girl from Guntersville, Ala., the Goat Man made a lasting impression. Bobbye Hudspeth, who was 7 or 8 when she met McCartney circa-1965, noticed his disheveled appearance and unusual odor but it was the goats that commanded her attention.

“I fell in love with one of his goats, a white nanny. I begged my dad to buy her,” said Hudspeth, who now lives in Chelsea. “When I got older and had my own money, I bought goats.”

Hudspeth kept goats as pets for the next four decades, owning as many as 16 at a time in varying breeds, including pygmies and fainting goats. After one trip to Tennessee to buy more goats, she suddenly realized she had become like the Goat Man:

“We had a flat tire,” she said. “We limped to a service station where we had to unload the crates to get to our jack. I took one of the goats out of the crate – she was show trained, so she was used to being led around in strange situations – and led her to some grass. People were coming over and taking pictures of their kids with the goats and it hit me ... I’ve turned into the Goat Man!”

Ferrelle Bagley of Warner Robins, Ga., recalls her parents taking her and her sisters to meet the Goat Man in Douglas, Ga., in the late 1940s. She remembers being astounded at the firm command McCartney had of his goats. Some children, however, were afraid of McCartney’s gruff, unkempt appearance and the unusual smells that accompanied him.

“We would all pile in the car and Daddy would take us to see him,” Bagley recalled. “My sister, Gail, was terrified of him. We would threaten her, telling her the Goat Man would get her if she didn’t behave. This always worked.”

My own grandfather, Nathanial Caldwell, told a story of a teacher in Macon, Ga., who once bought clothes for the Goat Man’s son when the boy traveled with him. McCartney promptly paid her back and told the teacher he did not accept charity and he could buy his son’s clothes.