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Dr. Jefferson J. Polk
Jefferson J. Polk was born on March 10, 1802 in Georgetown, Kentucky. His grandfather was Ephraim Polk who was from Scotland and immigrated to America and settled in Delaware. He fought in the American Revolution with his sons. Jefferson J. Polk’s father was Ephraim Polk Jr., who moved from Delaware to Maysville, Kentucky and later moved to Bryant’s Station, near Lexington. In 1786, he moved to Georgetown, Kentucky. In March of 1815, Jefferson Polk’s father died from “cold plague” when he was preparing to fight in the War of 1812. Jefferson Polk had five sisters and five brothers. He attended the neighborhood schools in Georgetown and learned the basics for an education. At a young age, Jefferson Polk left home in order to learn a trade.
At age fourteen, Polk became an apprentice for Colonel R. M. and James Johnson as a printer. They were owners of the Georgetown Patriot newspaper. Major William Sebree was editor. The paper went out of business and Polk sought employment in Lexington, Kentucky. John Bradford had a printing office. While in Lexington, as a young man, Polk decided to have a drink with his friends. He consumed alcohol one time and he decided to never drink again. He decided to dedicate his life to the temperance movement. In 1822, the first temperance society was organized in Lexington and Polk became a member of the Lexington Temperance Society. He was also a very religious man. He also had a thirst for knowledge and he read all the books he could that were being printed in the shop. His motto as a young man was “diligence in business.” He eventually became a foreman. While a printer, he met Eliza Tod and on September 10, 1823, he married her. He also joined the Methodist Church. Polk continued his career as a newspaper printer and assisted T. T. Skillman in printing the Western Luminary, which was the first newspaper of the Presbyterian Church established in Kentucky.
On October 15, 1824, Polk and his wife had their first child, Martha Polk. The following year in February of 1825, he left for Danville, Kentucky and purchased the Olive Branch which was a daily newspaper. He sold the business and opened the only bookstore in Danville. In his shop he sold different drugs and medicines. While in Danville, he was an agent and treasurer for the American Colonization Society and was instrumental in sending to Liberia many of the freed slaves and free blacks in the area. During this time, Polk had three sons: Ephraim, Jefferson and William. Unfortunately, his son Jefferson died.
In 1832, Polk became a member of the temperance society in Danville and was appointed an officer. He was also a member of the Sons of Temperance, Sons of Morality, which was against drinking, swearing, gambling, and Sabbath breaking and keeping bad company. During the Asiatic cholera epidemic of 1833, he took on the role of physician and handed out medication to the ailing members of his community.
Polk bought the Olive Branch newspaper again and he continued to be the editor. He had two more children. They were Margaret Grant and J. M. Polk. He sold his business and purchased a farm.
The Quarterly Conference at Danville gave Polk a license to preach and he became a Methodist circuit rider. He sold his farm because he was broke and was very much in debt. With the failure of the farm, Polk searched for a new career and decided to become a physician. While running his apothecary and bookstore in Danville, he studied law and medicine from reading all the books in his shop and felt that he had enough knowledge to become a doctor.
In 1839, Polk studied in the medical college in Lexington and in the spring of that year, he opened an active practice. He was a not only a preacher, but now a doctor. The next year, in 1840, Polk moved to Perryville and set his small office and his home right next door on Merchants Row. His practice increased and he became very active as a preacher in town. During this time, he had two more children. They were Rosa and Thomas J. He preached to large congregations from temporary pulpits.
By 1843, Polk was a very prosperous physician. Typhoid fever was a prevailing disease during this time period, and he claimed he was very successful in the treatment of the disease. He also studied midwifery, which he added to his skills. He claimed that he sometimes rode forty miles in a day and spent the night taking care of the sick in his community. In 1844, his daughter Eliza Belle was born.
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In 1848, Polk’s son William returned home from Transylvania College as a medical doctor. Polk and his son decided to form a partnership and opened an office together in town. They were in practice together for six years. In 1855, Polk ended his partnership with his son William. His son decided to open his own practice in Perryville. During that same year Jefferson Polk built the Antioch Church.
In 1859, Polk quit being a full-time doctor because of his bronchitis. In the 1860 Presidential election he voted for John Bell, who was running on the Constitutional Union Party, which took the position to support the Union, but also support slavery.
When the Civil War broke out Polk supported the United States government and was a staunch Union man. He tried to dissuade men from his community not to support disunion. During the Civil War, he supported the United States troops and went about feeding, encouraging, and administering medicine to the Union soldiers free of charge.
After the Battle of Perryville, on October 8, 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg pulled his army out of Perryville and left his thousands of sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield and in the makeshift hospitals in the community. The Union army not only had to deal with thousands of wounded and dead Union soldiers, they also had to deal with Bragg’s Confederate dead and wounded. Polk’s house was made into a makeshift hospital for eight or ten soldiers. The Federal army appointed
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Polk as a surgeon in a Federal field hospital containing forty wounded soldiers. He labored day and night until his health gave way. At the time, Polk was sixty years old with health issues. Polk was a staunch Unionist, but he put aside his political convictions to care for both Union and Confederate wounded. He assisted Dr. Karl Langenbecker, who was a Prussian born doctor who had immigrated to the South before the Civil War broke out. Langenbecker joined the 13th Louisiana Infantry Regiment and he remained behind to care for the wounded Confederates in the Perryville Christian Church, which was one of the main Rebel hospitals in town. Unfortunately, Langenbecker fell ill and Polk placed him in his home. On December 21, 1862, Langenbecker died and became another casualty of the battle. Out of common courtesy for a fellow surgeon, Polk had the doctor buried in his own family plot in the Perryville Hillcrest Cemetery.
After the battle, Polk decided to visit the battlefield. According to Polk, the dead and wounded seemed almost balanced on both sides. Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s army fled through Danville and Stanford and Somerset. On the second morning after the battle, Polk visited the battlefield. In passing out on the Springfield road, the fencing was all leveled to the ground and while he was walking the battlefield, he saw a dead Rebel scattered here and there. After proceeding about one mile, he came to a company of Union soldiers who had collected ten or twelve of their dead comrades and were preparing to bury them. Polk proceeded to Mr. Peter’s house, meeting on the way more than ten thousand troops pressing toward Perryville and in the rear of these troops were hundreds of men who had fled from their homes during Bragg’s occupancy of the state and were now returning to their homes. The first hospital Polk entered was Mr. [Jacob] Peter’s house. He found almost two hundred wounded soldiers, lying side by side on beds of straw. Polk stated that the soldiers were wounded in every possible way. He saw in the orchard close by a long trench, which had been dug, and Union soldier burial details were burying the dead; about fifteen were lying in a row, ready for internment. Polk pressed on northward, and “saw on either hand dead men and dead horses, canteens, muskets, cartridge boxes, broken ambulances, coats, hats and shoes, scattered thick over the ground.”i He reached Mr. John Russell’s white house “that has been made famous in the official report of Union General Don Carlos Buell, who was the commander of the Army of the Ohio. Here was the center of the great battle. The house was dotted over with hundreds of marks of musket and cannon balls and all around lay dead bodies of the soldiers both Union and Rebel. Many long trenches were ready made for their burial. In a skirt of the woods close by were scattered hundreds of the dead of both armies. The whole scene beggars description. The ground was strewn with soiled and torn clothes, muskets, blankets, and the various accoutrements of the dead soldiers. Trees not more than a foot in diameter contained from twenty to thirty musket balls and buck shot, which were put into them during the battle. Farms all around were one unfenced common.”
Polk counted four hundred dead men on a small spot of ground. He wrote that his “heart grew sick at the sight, and I ceased to enumerate them. I continued my visit in an easternly direction and for more than a mile everywhere the same evidence of battle and death were manifest. I noticed at one spot six dead horses, the entire team of a Rebel cannon. Turning my steps south toward Perryville, I saw dead rebels piled up in pens like hogs. I reached my home, praying to God that I might never again be called upon to visit a battlefield. For more than ten days after the battle, the field hospitals, except Antioch Church, and Mr. [Jacob] Goodnight’s farm, were being cleared of the wounded; the two alone excepted contained about three hundred of the wounded.” All the churches and public buildings, together with most of the private houses in Perryville were employed as hospitals. Thousands of the wounded were brought in and made as comfortable as possible. For months after the battle, attentive surgeons and rich sanitary stores were furnished together with voluntary contributions from the surrounding country. There was scarcely a house for ten miles around that was not encumbered more or less with the sick and wounded. For months hundreds of the wounded died every week.
Union General George Thomas ordered a corps of workmen, under the direction of Colonel R. N. Batcheldor, collected and reinterred the remains of the Union soldiers who had fallen in the battle on October 8. The spot of ground chosen for the cemetery was a mile and a half from the town of Perryville on the Springfield road, on an eminence overlooking the whole battlefield in a north easterly direction. The cemetery was square, containing just two acres, enclosed by a solid stone wall five feet in height and two and a half fee thick at bottom and two feet at top, with a large stone cap. Thomas made a correct transcription of all inscriptions which were written on the headboards, or carved upon trees, or deposited with the body in the grave. The officer directing the disinterment was furnished with a printed form, which was carefully filled out at the grave or trench and transmitted with the bodies to this cemetery. When possible, the burial detail buried the dead of the same regiment or state in the same section. They placed 969 Union soldiers in the Perryville National Cemetery. In 1868, the Union soldiers were reinterred at Camp Nelson National Cemetery in Jessamine County.
During the election of 1864, Polk was one of four people in town who voted for Lincoln which put him at odds with some of the community. Lincoln received less than one percent of the vote in Kentucky during that election.
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In 1867 Polk was acting claim agent for Union soldiers and postmaster for Perryville. On April 13, 1867, Polk’s wife Eliza died. In 1868, Mr. Atkins came to Perryville to sell whiskey in a building located on the Lebanon Road. The citizens of Perryville became engaged and a mass meeting was held in the Old Presbyterian Church on Cemetery Hill. The citizens passed a resolution. Two days later the citizens composed of men, women, and children met at the church, marched down cemetery hill to place where the whiskey was being sold. Dr. Polk, along with Rev. J. C. Gilliam, Rev. Winters, Dr. Calvert, John Tigg, S. P. Burton, and others reached the place of business. Dr. Polk approached the building, cane in hand, voice trembling from palsy, and knocked on the door. The voice within the building asked who was at the door. Dr. Polk said: “we have come to tell you, you can’t sell whiskey here. The male voice behind the door asked Polk if he was going to hurt him. Dr. Polk replied: “No, not with a ten foot pole, but you are going to leave town and not sell whiskey here.”ii During the night, a light snow fell and the next morning wagon wheel tracks could be seen where the gentleman from the business made a hasty retreat out of town. Legend tells of Carrie Nation, a national temperance leader, lived in Perryville at one time and was a great admirer of Dr. Polk.
Dr. Jefferson J Polk died on May 23, 1881 at the age of seventy-nine. He is buried in the Perryville Cemetery. His son Dr. William Tod Polk died on April 24, 1890 at the age of sixty-three and was also buried in the Perryville Cemetery.
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i. J. J. Polk, Autobiography of Dr. J. J. Polk: To Which is Added His Occasional Writings and biographies of Worthy Men and Women of Boyle County, Kentucky, 1867 reprint University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2017.
ii. Geraldine Crain Harmon, Chaplin Hills: History of Perryville, Kentucky Boyle County, Bluegrass Printing Company, Danville, Kentucky, 1971, 22
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Figures in History
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