The wanderings of Dr. Grube
by
Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune
Monday,
August 19th 2019
Early Jacksonville rarely had
a shortage of doctors, some with dubious training at best, and others so
professionally qualified one has to wonder why they would bring their talent
and their family to such an isolated Oregon town.
Dr. Franklin Grube may well
have been the most experienced.
Born Feb. 10, 1831, in
Pennsylvania, Franklin was the son of Jesse and Elizabeth Staufer. Elizabeth
was widowed in 1849, just as Franklin was about to enter Yale College.
After his Yale graduation,
Franklin attended the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, graduating
as a medical doctor in 1854. Rather than opening a practice, he immediately
filed for a passport and set sail for France, where he would study at the
University of France in Paris, and work in its hospital as an intern.
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| Dr. Franklin Grube's Passport Application |
A little over a year later,
he returned to the United States and established a medical office in Clinton,
Mississippi, before moving on to Geary City, Kansas.
With a growing practice and
his popularity with the residents, in 1859 he agreed to run for delegate to the
Kansas Constitutional Convention, representing the Free State Party. He was
already the county coroner, an office he retained until the beginning of the
Civil War.
When Franklin took his seat
in the newly formed Kansas House of Representatives in 1861, it appeared that
Kansas would be his home for the rest of his life, but in the summer of 1862,
when the Union government’s call came for physicians, Franklin returned to
Pennsylvania and joined the 126th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers. As the
regiment’s assistant surgeon, he would spend most of the next three years
living through the blood and dangers of war.
In 1863, he transferred to
Camp Dennison, near the Ohio River and not far from Cincinnati. He was the
hospital’s executive officer.
Whether on a leave or while
traveling back to a new assignment in Washington, D.C., Franklin stopped long
enough in Rochester, New York, to marry Adaline Culver on June 16, 1864.
A year after the war ended,
Franklin and his wife arrived in Portland and he opened a medical office. While
there, the couple’s first child, Lura, was born, but before she was a year and
a half old, she died.
Franklin and his wife
received a warm welcome in Jacksonville in the late summer of 1867. His
expertise was quickly put to use with an almost immediate appointment to the
town’s Coroner’s Jury. His examinations in criminal cases proved valuable in
subsequent trials.
When Jacksonville was struck
with a terrifying smallpox epidemic in 1868, he wrote a newspaper column,
carried in most Oregon newspapers, listing preventive measures based on his
years of experience with the disease, and an attempt to calm fears.
“There is no need to panic,”
he said. “Let the people pursue their usual avocations and avoid only those
houses where there is smallpox.”
In the midst of the epidemic,
Adaline Grube gave birth to the
couple’s second son. It was just six months
before Franklin, 38, suddenly died after suffering only four days with
congestion of the liver.
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| The resting place of Dr Franklin Grube & daughter, Lurie |
Before returning to
Rochester, Adaline brought daughter Lura from her Portland grave to rest with
her father. She buried them together in the Jacksonville Cemetery.
Adaline remarried, but her
tragedies were not over. In 1898, Lovell, her youngest son, died of pneumonia.
Six months later, a month before her oldest son, Warren, planned to marry, he
was murdered. It’s believed Adaline died before 1915.
Dr. Franklin Grube may have
spent only three years in Jacksonville, but in that short time he brought more
than a lifetime of medical experience to a town that could really use it.
Writer Bill Miller is the author
of “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and
stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.
