Dr. Martin H. Calkins
CALKINS, LOUDON
Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 5/20/2012 at 11:00:02
History of Medicine in Iowa, D. S. Fairchild, M.D., 1927
DR. MARTIN H. CALKINS was born near the town of Mexico, Oswego County, New York, September 15, 1828. He was of Mayflower and Colonial ancestry on both the maternal and paternal sides. He was educated in the common schools and at the age of seventeen began teaching in the country schools and later in the City of Oswego. He was teaching in that city when the first train of cars arrived. He held a teacher's state certificate which was number six in New York State.
After reading medicine in the office of Doctors Bowen and Dayton in Mexico, New York, he took a course in the College of Medicine in Geneva, New York, completing his medical studies in the University of New York City. He commenced practicing in Constantia, New York. He was married November 8, 1855 to Miss Lucinda Loudon of North Bay, Oneida County, New York. On the 14th of June, 1856 he came to the new state of Iowa and after spending a few weeks in Maquoketa, came to Wyoming, Jones County, Iowa, which was then a town of a dozen houses, but hopeful and growing rapidly. The surrounding country was a most beautiful rolling prairie, rapidly being peopled by settlers who were busily engaged in breaking the virgin soil and laying the foundations for the beautiful homes and farms of Jones County.
The young doctor built a dwelling on a block cornering Main and Washington streets. It was modest in size and the lumber was black walnut. Here on these same lots but in a more pretentious house built in later years, Dr. Calkins resided and practiced his profession for nearly fifty years. As a physician he was eminently successful, and held his very large practice perhaps as much by his social, genial strength of character and magnetic influence and the sunshine that always entered the sick room with his presence, as by the administration of drugs.
His personality was a force for good not only in the sick room, but in the entire growing community, and he was looked up to as a safe adviser and counselor. During his long practice, he responded faithfully and cheerfully to all calls and we have no knowledge of his ever pressing his patients for bills, or invoking the courts for assistance in collecting fees from those who should pay, but did not. It was often said of him that he never oppressed the poor, or failed in fully performing every obligation imposed upon a medical practioner, and because of these characteristics he held the love and respect of the people.
In 1862, acting as a mustering agent, he administered the oath of allegiance and mustered into the state militia, a company of eighty-nine men who afterwards formed Company K, 24th Iowa Infantry and served their country during the Civil War. Dr. Calkins erected a monument in Wyoming to these men and on it their names are inscribed. He also acted as one of the state commissioners in the year 1862-63 to go to the Southland and take the vote of the soldiers then in the field.
Dr. Calkins had little of the politician in him and never sought office. But when the Town of Wyoming was incorporated, he was unanimously chosen mayor. In 1881 he was nominated as the Republican candidate to represent the county in the lower house of the State Legislature. The Democrats making no nomination, the Doctor was unanimously elected. Two years later he was re-elected, and although opposed by a leading Democrat, polled in Wyoming Township, 200 out of 211 votes cast. In the legislature he was true to his party and to his conscience. He was one of its fifty-two members who voted for the prohibitory law. He led the house in the matter of oil inspection law and had opposed to him one of the most active and unscrupulous lobbies who went so far as to hide the bill after it was returned from the senate. But Dr. Calkins called a halt during the last hours of the assembly, had the bill searched for, found and put upon its passage and passed much to the surprise of the lobby who thought the matter disposed of for that session. The revenue from this bill to the State of Iowa amounts to a larger sum annually to say nothing of the safety which it guarantees.
Dr. Calkins was a writer of unusual ability and every day for many years wrote upon some subject, either scientific, historical or literary as a personal study. In these moments he forgot not the town and vicinity of his adoption but gathered together a chronological order of the reminiscences of the early days of the settlement of Wyoming town and township, weaving a most interesting history that formed a course of lectures delivered by him to his towns people about 1878. So fully had the doctor covered the ground that in 1878, (and in a later history) this history of Dr. Calkins was incorporated into the volumes, the editors saying the ground had been fully covered by the Doctor, and in language and thought, was superior to anything the editor could hope to place in the volumes. It was a high compliment to the hard working physician who had thus kept the annals of his town and vicinity in its early days, and made for Dr. Calkins a monument as a pioneer historian of Wyoming, that will live when the marble column is in dust.
He was a model man, living the life of one devoted to his profession, and while his name may not be found on the church rolls, he followed closely the golden rule of the Master in his daily life as an obligation due-one to the other-among all people. His upright life, courteous manner and kindly daily life set a standard of good living to generations of young people in the community, that has been for the betterment of the social life of Wyoming and Jones County.
For many years he served on the board of pension examiners in Jones County and as a local surgeon for the C. M. & St. P. R. R. His practice and superintendency of his farms made his life one of constant activity. At the time of his death he owned a farm in New York State which had been in the family for one hundred and twenty-seven years.
Dr. Calkins died September 27, 1909. Mrs. Calkins died December 25, 1915. They are survived by two daughters: Elva Calkins Briggs (Mrs. W. E.) Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mary Calkins Chassell, Wyoming, Iowa; two grandsons, Martin Calkins Briggs, a businessman of Minneapolis, and Walter Charles Briggs, a student at Yale; one granddaughter, Mary Calkins Briggs, a student in high school in Minneapolis.
Calkins grave
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