7. DR . HIRAM WORSTELL FAMILY

The Hundred Years of Tappan by Jon Baker

The Pittis family arrived in Harrison County in 1819; Ann was eleven years old. Harrison County, named for President Harrison, was formed from Jefferson and Tuscarawas counties just five years before. Cadiz, its county seat, was later known as “The Proudest Small Town in America” by virtue of a canvass taken in 1938 to determine which small town under 10,000 population could claim the greatest number of famous people as having been its citizens. Brownsville, near Deersville, was where the Pittis family settled and where Ann Pittis was reared.

Ann’s family, John Pittis, the brewer from Newport, Isle of Wight, his wife Mary Dore and their children, kept a tavern for the stagecoach trade and a resort for hunters. Deer, bear, wolves, panthers, catamounts [mountain lion], foxes, raccoons, opossums, polecats (skunks), groundhogs, squirrels, and other wild animals were in abundance, as well as copperheads and rattlesnakes. Brownsville was only two miles from Deersville, which was much more the community center. However, Brownsville did have the tavern, and a schoolhouse, which was the center of a country school district.

Hiram Worstell grew up in Steubenville. His parents were undoubtedly able to provide their family with a good standard of living. Matthew Worstell, Hiram’s father, was director of a bank in 1819 and speculated in real estate, buying and selling several properties over the years. He started his shoe and boot making business in 1824, at a time when the twenty-year-old Hiram might want to get off on his own. Hiram appears in the 1830 census for Cross Creek Township, across the Ohio River and the northern panhandle of West Virginia, in Washington County, Pennsylvania. This is the very location that his aunts and uncles lived, Matthew’s siblings, William, Polly, and Hetty. According to Commemorative Biographical Record Harrison, Ohio in the section devoted to Henry P. Worstell, it is written that “Soon after leaving the common schools Hiram Worstell entered the medical office of Dr. Tappan, at Steubenville, Ohio, with whom he remained until he was licensed as a practitioner, and the practice of medicine became his vocation for the greater part of his life. In politics Mr. Worstell was an ardent and progressive Republican, and always took an active part in the development of that party. He was a liberal and progressive man, and one who was ever numbered among the influential and substantial men of his section.”

There were about a dozen medical schools in existence in the United States at the time, including Columbian College, later known as George Washington University. The History of the School of Medicine, an alumni directory of George Washington University, year unknown, lists the expected requirements for a medical student, and took note of the fact that most doctors of the day did not attend medical school.

The following quotation is taken from the alumni directory. The material that follows the quotation gives some indications of the medical knowledge and treatments available to doctors at the time Hiram would be studying.

The five medical doctors on the staff in the Medical Department of Columbian College when it was founded gave their first lectures in a school building erected by the professors themselves. A lecture course lasted three months.

Of the standards set by the “more progressive medical educators,” Hiram was at least twenty-one, and he studied with a recognized physician. It might be supposed that he learned about Dr. Benjamin Rush and his use of bloodletting in the treatment of yellow fever during the epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. He would have studied about Jenner and the vaccination for smallpox that he discovered in 1796. Hiram may have studied anatomy, but not from Gray’s Anatomy, which Henry Gray did not write until 1858. However, he may have studied from Jones Quain’s Anatomy, which was written in 1828 and was highly respected. Knowledge of experiments done by William Beaumont in 1833 became widespread and was probably of interest to Hiram, as they were to the general public. Beaumont wrote of experiments he conducted on a patient who had received gunshot wounds in the stomach. Descriptions of these experiments may still appear in textbooks today. World Book quotes from Beaumont’s work as follows:

Diagnoses of diseases and fevers, such as “putrid sore throat” (diphtheria) were made by observing the color of urine. Other diseases could be diagnosed with the aid of the stethoscope, recently invented in 1825. When better glass making methods produced better lenses, the compound microscope became standard equipment. C. A. Spencer made the first American Microscopes in 1838. A wide variety of microscopes were available and a doctor would often carry a small portable one in its own travel case. It was probably not available to Hiram, as laboratory work with a microscope did not appear in the Columbian catalog until 1852.

It’s said that the scientific use of drugs did not come until the last half of the 19th century. Many plant-based drugs, such as quinine and ergot, digitalis (1785) and opium, and compounds of metals, such as mercury and arsenic, were used for centuries and provided material for the study of pharmacology. Aspirin, still a miracle drug, would not be available until 1899. Petroleum products such as kerosene (once used on sore throats), petroleum jelly (Vaseline), and other coal tar products were not available until after 1850, although pitch and oil were used in medicines by the American Indians. Germ theory was yet to come with the work of Lister (1865), Koch (1867), and Pasteur (1876), and of course there were no antibiotics. Even though the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” were discovered before 1800, it would not be used as such for a half century. The anesthetic properties of the other “recreational sniffing drug,” ether, were not used during surgery until 1842, when Dr. Crawford Long used it on a patient during an operation. He later used it in 1845, when delivering a baby. A dentist, William Morton, used it for tooth extraction in 1846. Chloroform, discovered in 1831, wasn’t used for anesthesia until 1847. Pathology was a study still unknown. Doctors were taught how to set broken bones, but certainly without an X-ray machine, which would be two generations later.

Hiram Worstell and Ann Pittis were married in Tuscarawas County (New Philadelphia, the county seat), just west of Harrison County, on Dec. 6, 1831. No city was recorded on the marriage certificate signed by Jacob Cozad, minister. Frank McGuire, in his letters, says the Worstells moved from “Steubenville then to Newcomerstown around 1830. From

Newcomerstown back to Uhrichsville and lived at the end of Deersville Ave.” The Pittis Genealogy says Hiram was the first physician in Uhrichsville, Ohio, a town just south of New Philadelphia. The obituary of Henry, one of Hiram’s sons, reads, “... his father, Dr. Hiram Worstell the first doctor of Uhrichsville...” An article in the Times Reporter, New Philadelphia, Ohio, gives some history concerning Tappan and lists some of its distinguished former residents, including “... Hiram Worstell, often referred to as Ohio’s first physician.” The History of Tuscarawas County, 1884, states, “The first physician to New Philadelphia was Christian Espech, Lutheran minister.” It was not unusual for the most educated person in town to be the minister and possibly a health practitioner.

Shortly after a year of marriage, January 1833, the Worstell’s first child, a girl they named Sarah, was stillborn. Before 1900, it was an accepted fact that 20 to 25 percent of babies would die before their first birthday. Maternal mortality during childbirth was almost 10 percent. Recorded birth information seems to indicate that stillbirths most often occur with the first-born child.

Ann’s next older sister, Jane Warrener Pittis, was married to John C. Auld, J.P., son of a carpenter from Ireland. He was only 48 when he died in January of 1834; he is buried in Sharon Cemetery near Deersville. John’s will, made just before he died, was witnessed by Hiram Worstell. That same year, April 14, 1834, Hiram’s son, James William, was born, and their next son, Henry Pittis Worstell, was born two years later, May 11, 1836, near Uhrichsville, Tuscarawas County. Another two years later, May 11, 1838, Thomas Pittis was born near Tippecanoe, Washington Township, Harrison County, about six miles southwest of Deersville. In 1840, the family was in New Philadelphia, about eight miles northwest of Uhrichsville, when Mary Jane was born on Oct. 19. She was only nine months old when she died. Rachel was born April 3, 1842. She was to have been married the day after she died December 17, 1865.

Hiram and family were still living in or near New Philadelphia when the Tuscarawas County Medical Society was organized there on June 10, 1844. He is listed with six other doctors in the county. It was there that John Allen was born September 4, 1844, and died the following spring, May 8, 1845.

Their eighth child was Edward Pittis, born December 2, 1846, and died September 17, 1867.

Ann’s youngest sister, Julia, married John Reynard in 1841, in Deersville. John was born in 1806, in Yorkshire, England. His parents settled in Jefferson County, and when John was a young man he moved to Harrison County. He joined the Feed Spring Church June 20, 1845. Their daughter, Mary Dore Reynard, was born that same year and the attending physician was Hiram Worstell. Two of the Reynard children, Alice and John, settled in Ottawa, Kansas.

By this time the Worstells were living on the farm between Feed Spring and Tappan, which Frank McGuire says had been part of Pittis property that one time extended from Beaver Dam, now part of Tappan Lake, to Clendening Lake. This farm had belonged to Ann’s father, John, and had passed to her brother Thomas, who had prospered in the engraving business in New York. F. McGuire believes Hiram and family were living on the farm for a time “when Hiram decided there should be some legal claim to the property, so he wrote to the Pittis family in Philadelphia and explained the situation. To his surprise they sent him a quit claim deed, gratis, to the farm, as a part of the inheritance of Ann Pittis Worstell.” The family Hiram wrote to was Thomas’ widow and son (this was the engraver Thomas Pittis of New York, not Philadelphia), and it was quitclaim deeded to Ann’s three surviving sons, James, Henry and Thomas. (This might have been in lieu of moneys from the sale of the Iowa land once owned by Edward Pittis and willed to five of his siblings, including Ann Pittis Worstell. The deed only records that the land was sold to “Pittis and Reynard...” So as it tuned out, Hiram had married a “woman with a little bit of property,” advice given to a young man in Tale of Two Cities). Ann also inherited $50 under her father’s will as well as a little under the will of her brother, Edward, from the sale of the lands at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, as mentioned.

The Worstells attended the Feed Spring Church where Ann became a member in 1850. Our Harrison Heritage, a publication of the Harrison County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, Vol. XI, No. 4, Winter 1993, carries a story copied from The Cadiz Republican of April 3, 1902. This story, “Feed Spring Interesting History of an Old Wagoner’s Station” is quoted in part in the following paragraphs:

On February first of that same year, 1850, Sarah Jane Worstell was born. On January 29, 1851, after nearly twenty years of child-bearing, Ann would lose yet another child, Sarah Jane, before her first birthday. She was the last of the nine children of Dr. Hiram Worstell, of whom only the three eldest males survived.

One might expect that even though Hiram continued doctoring after moving to the farm, he also did a little farming and that the three boys engaged in the work on the farm as well. Since Tappan did not get a schoolhouse until the early 1850s, the children would have attended the school in Feed Spring that was built about the same time as the church in 1827.

On February 13, 1862, Hiram’s eldest son, James William Worstell, nearly 28 years old and still single, volunteered for service with the 69th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry for a period of three years. His military records give his occupation as farmer, his physical description as age 30 years, eyes blue, hair dark, complexion dark, height 6’ 1/2”. His Company K mustered in March 25, 1862, at Camp Chase, Ohio, with William Cady, 1st. Lieutenant 69th Ohio Volunteer Infantry commanding. James had a rank of “5 Sg’t.” James and the 69th left Atlanta, Georgia, with General Sherman. During the battle at Bentonville, North Carolina, March 19, 1865, James was shot in the mouth. The 69th mustered out July 17, 1865. From the record of battles of the 69th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, the military records of James Worstell, and historical accounts of the war, the following information of James’ Civil War action has been compiled.

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In the fall of 1865, James’ brother, Henry, returned home from his sojourn in California. Their brother Thomas was home by Christmas 1868.