The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 117

115 J' MARCH 21, 19S Dr. Archer's ledgers. To you probably the bio! story of Lady Montague's discovery in Turkey is so well known that it is taken as a matter of course, but as we have projected our-selves back into the period let us read of the exodus from Joppa when the epidemic breaks out there, and the exodus from Philadelphia to Germantown whenever smallpox arrived on some ship in that important center. Little ember '10, 177 witn the fines fmposecT and notations as to those who paid their fines. The list contains 256 names; as only the heads of families were asked to sign, we can gauge the proportion of Tories or irresolute families who were non-associators.

The population of Harford Freemen taken in 1776 by order of the committee reports 9,423 whites, which, if divided into families of seven (probably a February, 1777 Thomas finltb at Sn quehauna Ferry 10 of yr. family for 8,500 herring. His usual charge was 1 per person inoculated, but in the case of John Lee Webster in 1777, he wholesaled thirty-one Negroes at 10 shillings each to be paid in corn. In all he records 2S7 inoculations, mostly in 76-'77. The curious angle of this inoculation to me is, why, when companies were being fornwd in Harford in which Dr.

Archer was first a road at Churchville (then called the Lower Crossroads) was the road past Medical Hall, crossing Deer creek at Priestford, and on to the fording of the Susquehanna at 'Bald Friar. This was the route taken by Lafayette in 1781 on his way to Yorktown. It was also necessary for part of the French troops marching through to Yorktown to leave Rocham-beau at Havre de Grace, on account of the small number of boats for ferrying the troops across the Susquehanna, and to seek the fording at Bald Friar, thence marching past Medical Hall via Churchville to Bush Town, where they joined Rochambcau's forces, which had been obliged to camp there without tents until they came. The "rolling roads" over which tobacco in hogsheads found its way to Joppa (the then metropolis), of course, then existed and still exist, under their original designation of "Joppa Road," but they radi-. ated from that point to the back country, to Towson and beyond.

NO wonder Dr. John charged a shilling a mile, and double that for visits at "nocte," when it was necessary to watch the blazed trails for one notch on a tree or for two notches, as he wandered through the trackless forest of the vBig Woods" (so still called), or toward the river hills of the Susquehanna, or maybe three notches to Slate Ridge, at the quarries of Delta on the Pennsylvania border. A circle of fifteen miles around Medical Hall would probably include most of his eagerly waiting patients. How did they communicate with him? How did he get there on snowy days or over swollen streams in the early spring? No closed car for a rainy day; no windshield wiper to be worried with on a sleeting day, and yet day after day, year in and year out, his ledgers record one and usually many more visits and prescriptions carried over paths and roads that only a hardy pioneer could survive. He could not have gotten home at right, even had he wanted; no horse could have stood the grilling trials of mud or snow or heat or storm ten miles or more back and forth.

To show the attitude of poor Catherine at home in Medical Hall, with no telephone, no electric lights, with six of her ten children (four having died in infancy) all six boys at that it is said that when on one occasion a stranger appeared at Medical Hall to inquire if Dr. Archer lived there, she, sarcastically" replied, "a man of that name gets his washing done here." the year 1773 is active, with three and four visits a day until December. 1774 is perhaps his busiest year, day after day, with two or three visits each day, but on December 22 of this year there are no visits, because he is at Bush at a meeting of the Committee of Safety for Harford County, and again on January 2, 177S, where he starts his patriotic work and votes for the resolution to collect contributions "for the Relief of theToor of the Town of Boston or for the purchase of Arms and Ammunition for the defence of our Lives, Liberties ai.t. Properties." This same resolution which appointed committees for each "hundred" of Harford county provided that a report should be made "of such men (if any) who dead to every feeling of humanity and to all sense of their own Danger refuse to give anything to either of the above purposes." Dr. John was at that meeting appointed as one of those "to represent this County in the next Convention" at Annapolis.

The amounts collected in three of the hundreds which were reported to the committee on January 23, 1775, show that there was greater interest "in Arms and Ammunition" than sympathy for the "Popr of Boston." His MEDICAL II ALL captain and then major of a battalion, did he risk the spread of smallpox among the soldiers through inoculation when the Baltimore committee had practically tabooed Dr. Stevenson's continuing it? I am afraid if we take another ladle from his punchbowl and continue to open these ledgers we may entirely forget the present. The old doctor probably would not have hesitated to take as many as he desired, because his inventory shows that he left 136 gallons of brandy at 50 cents a gallon, a copper still worth $50, arid two troughs and cider works worth $10, and, saddest of all, nine empty barrels at 25 cents each I Undoubtedly his love of work was greater than his love of money. The inventory of his estate shows that of the separate debts there were $36,332 to be collected, but the copy of the will of Dr. Thomas Archer, his son, shows that the executors were too hopeful in their estimate of what ceuld be collected, so that Dr.

Thomas relieved them of his share as returned to the court. we were inclined to feel during (he period of the late war that we suffered greatly when the purchasing value of the dollar dropped to 50 cents, but consider the difficulties of Dr. John in the various changes in the form of currency during the period of 1776-1781. In the back of one of his ledgers is a table showing his struggles in the depreciation of Continental money in Baltimore. It took 1 American shillings to buy an English shilling in 1777, 4 in 1778, 40 in 1780, 110 in January, 1781, and 2S0 six months later.

We see why a worthless thing was described as "not worth a continental." and now comes the third period of the doctor's life, The Revolution is over, and the active period of the old doctor as a young man is past. He settles down with a family of six boys, and turns his energies to their education. Each of the five older boys first Dr. Thomas, second Dr. Robert Harris, third Dr.

John Archer, fourth Dr. James Archer and fifth George Washington followed the old gentleman's steps and started the study of medicine. All became doctors except George Washington, who died in 1800 at the age of 1, while preparing for his medical course under the tutelage of his father at Medical Hall. The sixth son, the "little Benjamin," born in 1786, probably did not have the opportunity of feeling the influence of the old doctor's enthusiasm in his declining years, and turned to the law, later becoming a chief justice of Maryland and under Presidential appointment judge of the Mississippi Territory with Gubernatorial powers. i With these five boys as a nucleus, and with forty-five other boys from the neighborhood and from a distance, Dr.

John renamed his farm "Uncle's Good Will" and "Outquartcr" by a much more appropriate name, which it still retains "Medical Hall." He built a stone building for the students below the springhouse, and his books show that he made notations as to which student went with him on his visits, or which student was sent to attend some minor case. The Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland is in possession of the minutes of the Harford Medical Society, which held meetings at Medical Hall, and recorded the experiences of each of the young internes of cases which interested them most. wonder is there, then, for the frame of mind in which the colonists accepted smallpox as inevitable. So universal was the pockmark that advertisements of runaway slaves or indentured white servants gave as a form of easy identification "he is not pockmarked." One rarely thinks of George Washington as being pockmarked, but read of his experience detailed at length in his diary, during his visit to Barbados. The doctors of that period found a ready reception for the fad of gaining immunity from smallpox by actually being inoculated with the germ, and having it through with.

The attack was evidently lighter, al small average for those days), makes 1,346 families, of which 256 were Protestants, about one-fifth. in 1776 his visits are more and more spasmodic. We know he was in Annapolis as a delegate from Harford to the convention of August 14, 1776, and we know from the Maryland archives that the Council of Safety on February 16, 1776, "Ordered that the Treasurer of the Western Shoie pay to Messrs. John Archer and James Harris (undoubtedly his brother-in-law living at the Lower Crossroads or Churchville) or their order 300 to enable them to carry on their Linen Manufactory in Harford County," which was to be paid one-third on June 1, one-third on September 1 and one-third December 1 in "Linen of about six hundred or courser, fit for Tenting or Tow Linen wove thick, as our Troops must very shortly take the field." And on November 11, 1776, he must have been in Annapolis, as James Harris sends him yards of hemp linen to that point to be delivered by him to the Convention of Maryland or Council of Safety. The details of the number of yards in each of the sixteen pieces with the cost are submitted.

In October, 1776, he received 100 to pay Richard Dallam on account of his gun manufactory. An order was passed that powder was to be taken care of by Archer, and Dallam at Lower Crossroads (Churchville). And so it goes. His visits are neglected; he is full of the spirit of '76. though never free from dangerous outcome.

Dr. Archer's treatment for smallpox was to give large doses of jalap, one of his favorite medicines. DR. henry Stevenson, who, I think, was his uncle although I have not yet secured the proof had turned his handsome house in Baltimore on Parnassus Hill (now probably the site of the Little Sisters of the Poor in East Baltimore) into a smallpox hospital, and patients came from the various colonies to have a comfortable case of smallpox in pleasant surroundings. However, Dr.

Stevenson was a Tory, and the Baltimore Council of Safety felt that there was some danger of spreading smallpox among the provincial soldiers going to the front. They therefore requested him, in 1776, to refrain from further inoculation on this account. Whereupon he left Baltimore, and joined the British Navy in New York as a surgeon, his smallpox hospital becoming confiscated British property. As Dr. Stevenson was the most noted in-oculator in the colonies, could the.

Harford county people have felt that in his absence they could turn to his nephew, who was not a Tory, and safeguard themselves against the scourge of smallpox? For at this period Dr. Archer starts his inoculation for smallpox. Three families are inoculated in November and December of 1775. In January and February and March of 1776 we find him inoculating wholesale, as many as thirty-three a day, and, strangely enough, he makes it as cash mother dies in 1774 and as the only child he inherits Medical Hall. dr.

john archer had formed at the Lower Crossroads (Churchville) a company of which he was the captain, Edward Prall his first lieutenant and James Allison his serond lieutenant. The seventy-eight names enrolled as privates to this original paper were practically all patients named in his ledgers. The county is in an uproar. Gunsmiths' establishments, bayonet manufactories, saltpetre and gunpowder works, searchers for guns, blanket weavers and linen are rampant. What became of the poor patients? It reminds one of the late war, when every seeming lack of patriotism was questioned.

So then, even Judge Benjamin Rumsey, of Joppa, who worked and wrote unceasingly (see Maryland archives), was called before the Harford committee at Bush for killing a lamb for his family use, in defiance of the order of the Annapolis Committee of Safety. we wiLt Take another ladleful from Dr. John Archer's Lowestoft bowl, open anohcr ledger, and study a different phase of his wrk. To me the subject of inoculation for small-pox was brand new until I began to study now opens the stirring year of 1775, with Visits less regularly, but meetings more frequently, at Harford Town (Bush) every week or two weeks, and some at Churchville (Lower Crossroads). The kindling of the Revolution was being fanned into flame.

He is at Bush to sign the famous "Harford Declaration" on March 22, 1775, and enters no visits for four days after that. The times were hot. The convention had been held in Annapolis from July 26 to August 14, 1775, and the "Association of Freemen" signed that important precursor of the Declaration of Independence, copies of which were sent to the various county committees. Copies of this were again made and taken throughout every hundred in Harford county, where each freeholder (land owner) and freeman was asked to sign those who would net were called "non-associators" and fined by the committee. The fines varied in accordance with their wealth.

A list of non-associators and non-enrollers was filed Sep- dr. John must have kept his youth, or he could not have held the boys the way he did, nor have created the enthusiasm which has been transmitted from generation to generation, until we find at least eighteen doctors among his descendants. Even Stevenson, the judge, who was the father of nine children, produced one son, Dr. John Ccorgc, of Point Coupee, who followed the medical profession, and one grandson, Dr. Stevenson White Turpin, who carried on the medical study in Louisiana, and one great grandson, Dr.

Armfield F. Van Bibber, who now "holds high the torch-' only five miles from Medical Hall, at Belair, almost next door to Dr. William Stevenson Archer, the grandson of Dr. John Archer, who represents that branch. (or equivalent) business, while his other visits and prescriptions are charged and carried for years, accounts mounting up with apparently no collections and carried from ledger to ledger, or forgotten.

Yet he almost invariably collects at the time for inoculation. Here are some of the interesting items: Feliru.iry 8, J770 William 10 of yr. Family for .1000 shingles. February 8, 1776 Simon Denny 0 of yr. Family fur a cow and 20 xliillings.

March 8, 1770 Widow of McDannul 5 of yr. Family to be paid in thinning..