Army scenes on the Chickahominy

Army scenes on the Chickahominy
Harper''s pictorial history of the Civil War. (Chicago : Star Publishing Co. 1866)

Wednesday, April 15, 2020



                                                NEW KENT ACADEMY.
THIS School will be continued next year at St. Peter's Church, New Kent. The first term will commence on the 3d day of January. Tuition as heretofore, 35 dollars per year for the higher branches, and 35 dollars per year for English studies, due at the close of each term. Boarding 80 dollars per year, beds excepted The superior qualifications of my Assistant Instructor will enable me to present to the youth who attend my school, advantages for literary and scientific improvement, which flatter myself are not exceeded in any Academy in Virginia:- and parents may rest assured that the morals and deportment of the youth who attend the school, will claim our particular regard. To recommend my school to public patronage, I depend on the improvement of those who enjoy its advantages.                                                JON SILLIMAN.
New Kent, Dec. 18                                                    69-4t

-Richmond Enquirer, 21 December 1824



Jonathan Silliman was born in Chester, Conn, July 22, 1793, and died in Cornwall, N.Y., May 13, 1885, aged nearly 92 years. He was the son of Deacon Thomas and Huldah (Dunk) Silliman and the grandson of the Rev. Robert Silliman (Y.C. 1737.) 
He studied theology in Andover Seminary, teaching meantime for one year in Phillips Academy and finishing his professional studies in 1821. He soon went South and labored as a home missionary in eastern Virginia, being ordained on October 8, 1823. In 1830 he was settled over the Presbyterian Church in New Kent, Va., and on September 5, 1832, he married Anna, daughter of the late Rev. Dr Amzi Armstrong of Perth Amboy, N.J., and widow of Mr. Jared Mead; she was a woman of remarkable intelligence. As both his own and his wife's health suffered from the Virginia climate, they returned to the North in 1835, and in the same year he was installed over the Canterbury Presbyterian Church in Cornwall, Orange County, N.Y., where he labored in the ministry until his voluntary retirement in 1862. He continued his residence among his former people, and his benign presence was felt as a benediction. 
His wife died January 24, 1882. Their only child a colonel, in the Union army, died at Beaufort, S.C., in 1864.

-Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University ... Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Alumni 1880

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Virus and Response 1856 Pt, VII- the End and Peticolas

Some more information on the rather interesting Dr. Arthur Edward Peticolas (1824- Nov 27 1868) He was the grandson of Phillipe Abraham Peticolas born March 1760 Meziers, France came to American by way of Santo Domingo. His parents were Edward F. Peticolas(b 1793 Pa) and Jane Pitfield Braddick, both of artistic leanings, Edward F. Peticolas being one of the most well known painters of the Virginia of the time; young Arthur E. Peticolas displayed some canvases himself as a young man before turning to medicine.*

The below is from his obituary in the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal of February 1869.

He received his medical education in the Medical Department of Hampden-Sidney College, (now the Medical College of Virginia), where he graduated in March, 1849. 
. . . 
In the autumn of 1854, the professor of anatomy, Dr. Johnson, having met his death by the loss of the steamer Arctic, on which he was returning from Europe, Dr. Peticolas was appointed by the faculty to deliver the lectures in that department, during the ensuing winter course, and in the following March, he was duly elected by the board of visitors to the vacant professorship. 
. . .
At the commencement of the war, he received a commission as surgeon in the army of the Confederate States, and was soon after assigned to duty as a member of the board established at Richmond for the examination of surgeons and assistant surgeons, in which position he remained until the termination of hostilities. 
The increasing inroads of his relentless disease upon his strength and spirits drove him at length to seek relief in a change of climate, and, with this view, he accepted, in the summer of 1867, the offer of the chair of anatomy in the New Orleans School of Medicine, and bade adieu to the Institution with which, in various relations, he had been so long connected. His hopes of amendment, however, were doomed to disappointment, and he resigned his position in New Orleans at the close of his first course. Returning to Richmond, he resumed the practice of his profession, and about one year ago, without solicitation on his part, he was elected superintendent of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum, at Williamsburg.
. . .
While bodily suffering and mental anxiety threw a tinge of melancholy over his character and imparted to his manners a habitual reserve which was unattractive to the stranger, the sincerity and real kindliness of his nature won for him the cordial esteem and affection of those who knew him most intimately.


The article below is rather more . . . direct  . . . about the end of Dr. Peticolas.

Dr Arthur E Peticolas.
Dr Arthur E Peticolas, Superintendent the Eastern Lunatic Asylum at Williamsburg, committed suicide there on the morning of Nov. 28th, by leaping from a window of the building, and dashing out his brains. He was a distinguished physician, and formerly a professor the medical college at Richmond. His mind been unsettled for some time past. 

-The Medical and Surgical Reporter, Philadelphia, Oct. 17, 1868



*"Talented Virginians: The Peticolas Family"-L. Moody Simms, Jr.
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan., 1977),


Friday, April 3, 2020

Virus and Response 1856 Pt VII- Names and Places

Some of the people affected in the 1856 small Pox outbreak, either infected "naturally" or who may have been infected by the "live" vaccine from the full text of the report to the General Assembly.

1) "Thomas Breeden" "Mrs Breeden the wife of the deceased, her son Lloyd, Joseph Robbins a boy of 12 years of age living in the family"

2) "George W. Mitchell the head of the family, his wife, and infant daughter"

3) "Pryor a free negro lad aged about 18 years"

4)"Peter an old man aged about 70 years the property of John G. Mitchell."

5)Ellen Richardson and George Richardson, the children of Dr. W. Pryor Richardson

6) Leroy Williams

7) Elizabeth a black girl about 14

8) "four negroes" Jack, George, Lizzy, Drusilla,

9) "Mr. (Thomas) Boswell's son and daughter aged about 17 and 13 years and a young man in the family named Lewellin Crowdis"

10) William O. Hockaday- "17 members of family" and Charles, Dick, and George Lewis Washington

11) Mrs Sally Hockaday at her residence, " A colored man named Washington Scott"

12) Thomas M. Timberlake-"14 members of family"

Below a map of the chief area of infection- you will notice some of the family names from the report, such as Digges(orDiggs), Hockaday, Timbelake, Mitchel, Williams, Boswell, and Lacy.



Below is a map of the area near Tabernacle Church showing the residence (actually residences) of Dr. Richardson as well as a Mitchel property on Weir Creek that seems a likely place for the Smallpox hospital mentioned.