William and Lydia Langsdorf raised an exceptional brood . Their children, one in particular, literally, cau se d bells to ring and lights to go out. The Longsdorfs erased tradition when it stood between them and their legitimate goals.
A western Cumberland County village in the middle of the 19th century seems an unlikely place to find pioneers. Pioneers create and do what ha s not been tried and done before . No one can predict who they will be and where and when they will be found .
A hundred years ago the Longsdorfs began upsetting the limitations put on women by the myth of female inferiority.
In the mid-1880's Zatae Longsdorfbecame the first female student to attend Dickinson College in Carlisle. She put further strain on a sensitive situation by entering the Pierson Oratorical Contest. During her presentation male hecklers tried to up set her concentration with hoots and cat call s. Another group rang the College bell to distract her, and then the gas lights were turned out. Zatae kept her composure and finis hed her speech . At the end of the competition the judges declared Zatae the winner and awarded her the gold medal.
William Henry Langsdorf, the fourth child of Adam and Mary Senseman Longsdorf, began life March 24, 1834 on a farm in Silver Spring Township, Cumberland County. In 1844 his father was elected Sheriff; the family moved to Carlisle, but in 1848 the father died .2 At age fifteen William entered Dickinson College and after three years study decided to make medicine his career. He spent some time with a Dr. Dale and then entered Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, graduating in 1856 . He went on to Pennsylvania Dental School and qualified in that profession the following year.
Less is known about Lydia Rebecca Haverstick. She too was born on a Silver Spring Township farm, on March 7, 1836. There is confusing information about Lydia 's education. One account credits her with graduating from a school named Wellsley [sic ), but Wellesley College was not founded, until 1875, so it could not have been that institution. An undated newspaper clipping names Lydia as principal of Newville High School at age sixteen. 3 While some students then graduated from college at an earlier age than now, sixteen is a young age for both graduating and for filling a principal's position. Since she married in 1857 and went west, it is probable that she was at Newville for about three years.
William and Lydia were married April 7, 1857. William graduated from Pennsylvania Dental School in that year, and the young couple followed the American trend of many decades and went west. While traveling down the Ohio River their steamboat caught fire and burned, destroying their belongings. Somehow they coped with this crisis and boarded a second boat which wrecked and sank. They finally arrived in Bellevue, Nebraska, a small town a short distance south of Omaha. William began a medical practice and the first Longsdorf child, Harold Hamilton, was born there July 28, 1858. After about a year in Bellevue the young family decided to move farther west.
Because Denver was the destination, there is the suggestion that gold played a part in the move, but one can only speculate about the trip from Bellevue to Denver. The 1850's were still the time of the Indian and the buffalo.
Denver is credited with consisting at that time of four cabins and forty men . This implies that Lydia was the only woman in the camp. If so, she probably received the same kind of respect and near reverence that Mark Twain notes was extended to lone women in a gold camp in his book, Roughing It. One can imagine young Harold in the ro le of a favorite in the camp. Living arrangements were made for the young doctor and his family. For the next year William cared for the medical needs of the fledgling community and combined prospecting with medical business. Perhaps both gold and fees failed to come to hand regularly, because in 1859 the Longsdorfs reversed directions and returned to the east. They settled in Centerville, Penn Township, Cumberland County where the doctor established a practice.
In 1860 the second child, Ernest, was born. In the Spring of 1861 the Civil War began. Whether the young doctor had strong convictions about slavery or if adventure attracted him does not appear. In any event, he joined the 9th Pennsylvania Calvary, as a first lieutenant apparently serving as a field officer rather than as a physician. After being in eighty engagements, he was discharged January 18, 1864 as a major with two broken ankles. While on leave in November of 1863 he attended the dedication of the Military Cemetery at Gettysburg with his five year old son, Harold, and heard Lincoln's famous speech . Special provisions had been made for veterans on the occasion. Lincoln noticed the pair and motioned them to the front, where he shook hands with Harold, an experience recounted throughout his life.
W. H. Langsdorf now sett led into his professional and private life. He belonged to the Second Presbyterian Church, was an officer in a Masonic Lodge, and a Democrat. The medical practice and the family grew as the two Langsdorf sons were followed by four daughters. Zatae was born in 1866. The name was created by the mother for this child, an indication of Lydia's individuality. Hildegarde was born in 1868, Jessica in 1870, and Persis in 1874. When they were only a few years beyond childhood, they were put in situations where much was required of them, and they performed under difficult circumstances. The term "tomboy'' was likely an accurate description of the girls, but the arts, particularly music, were part of their life. Academic development was important; accomplishments in the following years show this.
It is not possible to know in what combination the parents exerted their influences. A father with a medical degree would have been able to provide a good academic climate. In the Langsdorf family the mother was educated as well and would provide similar potential. Perhaps a situation existed where the parents regarded the intellectual, cultural, and personal growth of the children as a mutual undertaking. In a newspaper interview Harold Langsdorf credited his mother with the stronger hand in directing the educational path taken by the children. Whatever the family dynamics, impressive results followed.
The routine of the Longsdorf family involved managing the house, rearing the children, and making the money. Each parent was involved in at least one activity beyond the parental roles. An obituary notice of Lydia states that she wrote articles about economics and education for what are described as "well known, widely-circulated magazines," not more particularly identified.
William was involved in building the Miramar Iron and Railroad Company along the Yellow Breeches Creek, a line which later became the Harrisburg and Potomac and in 1879 part of the Philadelphia and Reading (the so-called "Huff and Puff," "Hungry and Poor," and "Hush and Push.") When the organization meeting for the first of these was held 20 June 1870 at the Big Spring Hotel in Newville, William Longsdorf was named a director . When the railroad was built, the small station one-half mile south of Centerville was named Langsdorf. The station is now gone, but the feed mill and the area are still known by that name.
In 1898 he moved to Camp Hill and erected a substantial frame house still standing at the corner of present South 17th and Market Streets. There he practiced medicine until his death in 1905.
In 1879 Harold graduated from Dickinson College. The year 1881 was an eventful one for the family. Ernest, who was born in 1860, died, the cause of death left unreported, although a fictional account of the family written in the 1920's by Zatae's daughter Enid tells of the lifelong heart problem of a son who died. In 1881 William ran for the office of County Treasurer and won. Soon after this the family moved to Carlisle. Meanwhile Harold had been attending the Baltimore College of Physicians and Surgeons and graduated in 1882. The same year he married Eleanor Ernst of Walnut Bottom and assumed his father's practice at Centerville.
Education continued to have a priority with the Longsdorfs. In the fall of 1883 Zatae entered Wellesley and completed her first year there. In the summer of 1884 something very different was being planned. Dr. William went to James A. McCauley, the President of Dickinson College, to say that he had four daughters who could handle the Dickinson curriculum and at the same time cope with the male students, if the College would adopt a coeducation policy. Oberlin College in Ohio had led the way with coeducation fifty years earlier. The trustees were consulted and approved the idea. In the fall of 1884 Zatae Langsdorf entered Dickinson as a second year student, and her sis ter Hildegarde was in the Freshman class.·
Their presence on the campus upset a good portion of the student body. Live mice and garter snakes were put in the girls' coat pockets. The girls' country childhood had prepared them for this kind of hazing; it was not a serious problem. The oratorical competition mentioned above was a structured attack on Zatae's composure while she was in a stressful situation and went beyond fair play. Fortunately she had the personal resources to prevail over the shouts, bells, and darkness. Her youngest sister, Persis, stood by the lectern and turned the pages while wearing a necklace made from gold her father had mined in Colorado. In 1887 Zatae became the first woman to be graduated from Dickinson.
Zatae went on to Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia and was graduated in 1890, having borrowed at least part of the money for her medical education. After receiving her degree she worked at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, at Tweksbury Alms House in Massachusetts, and at Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Idaho. While at the Reservation she once treated a patient who was having delirium tremens. He imagined he was seeing rats and kept throwing furniture and sticks of wood at them, while Zatae dodged in self defense. Her agility allowed her to get a chloroform-soaked cloth over the man's face and quiet him. The Massachusetts and Idaho work enabled the young doctor to_ repay her college loans.
While working in Massachusetts she met Doctor Amos G. Straw, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Medical School. They were married November 12, 1891 at the Langsdorf home in Carlisle but settled in Manchester, New Hampshire, where they both started practices.
The other Langsdorf girls followed their older sister as students at Dickinson. Hildegarde was graduated in 1888, one of three women in a class of twenty- eight. She went on to Woman's Medical College and received her medical degree in 1890. After a short period in New England she returned to Carlisle to practice. Hilda was the first woman member and a vice president of the Cumberland County Medical Society. When she joined, she became the third Langsdorf, along with her father William and her brother Harold, to enter the group . Later she became Associate Editor of the Pennsylvania Medica Journal.
Jessica was graduated from Dickinson in 1891, attended Woman's Medical College, but was not graduated. Instead, in 1917 she earned a degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry at the age of forty-seven and practiced until she was eighty-one. Jessica married the Reverend Hiram R Bozarth of Millersville in 1894, but was widowed at an early age. She lived to be ninety-three. Persis was a Dickinson graduate in 1894. She married Ernest W. Sipple and resided at Wallingford and later Montrose. She lived to be 101, writing in a firm hand not long before her death to remind Dickinson College that three of her mother' s brother s were also graduates8 Zatae Langsdorf and her sister s were being educated at a time when women were gaining acceptance into the medical profession. In 1886 some fifty-six per cent of the Boston University Medical School class were women, and at Tufts forty-two per cent were women. After World War I, however , there was a decline in the number of w omen entering medical schools, a trend that reversed in the 1970's. It is curious that in the 1920's, when women became eligible to vote and were liberated from certain social taboos, that the number of female medical students dropped and that at Dickinson "some trustees suggested that admission of women be suspended and contracts of women faculty be terminated.
While his sisters were ignoring tradition, Dr. Harold continued the country practice begun by his father at Centerville. Because Carlisle Hospital did not open until 1916, all routine and emergency care was given in the home or at the doctor's office. The iron-making community at Pine Grove Furance was under Dr. Longsdorfs care, and he made the five mile trip over the mountain routinely to care for the illnesses and injuries of the people there.
A brief look at rural medical practice at the time appears in a diary of John Myers of Centerville. On December 17, 1901 he wrote : "H. H. Langsdorf, M.D., assisted by his sister Dr . Hilda Langsdorf, amputated a leg for Wm. Fisher of Centerville."
In 1900 Dr. Harold took a four month leave from medicine at the request of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. He was asked to make a study of the consolidation of country schools into central units and the transport of pupils to such schools. He went to New England and later to Ohio where this experiment was in operation. At the end of this period he submitted a 127 page report titled, "The Consolidation of Country Schools and Transportation of Scholars by Use of Vans." The Commonwealth printed 25,000 copies of the report . A Penn Township School Director and President of the Cumberland County School Directors Association, Dr. Langsdorf was also an elder in the United Presbyterian Church in Newville and from 1902 until his death was a director of the Farmers Trust Company in Carlisle.
In the early 1890's Zatae and Amos Straw began their married life in Manchester, New Hampshire. Two sons, Wayne and David, and two daughters, Enid and Zatae, were born to them. Until she died in 1955 at age eighty-nine Zatae was occupied in an amazing number of interests and was credited with an impressive list of "firsts."
She held offices in both the Manchester and New Hampshire Medical Societies. In 1926 Zatae was elect ed president of the New Hampshire Republican Convention. Dissatisfaction with school conditions caused her to run for school office, and Zatae was the first woman elected to the New Hampshire House legislature. While in the New Hampshire House she sponsored legislation requiring premarital health certification. A love of the outdoors caused her to support the licensing of women to fish. Earlier she had spoken of voting as a woman's right, not as a privilege or gift. She supported the hiring of women police.
The automobile came along in her time, and Zatae was one of the first women in the State to drive. After the death of Dr. Henry in 1905, Lydia visited Manchester regularly and added her voice to Zatae's on suffrage and other women's issues.
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Dr. Amos Straw was assigned to a training unit that prepared doctors for the situations they would find in France. At the war's end Amos became commander of the American Legion Post in Manchester, and Zatae headed the Auxiliary. They were active in veterans interests the remainder of their lives. During the War Dr. Zatae was involved with home front support of the men in military service.
In the Langsdorf collection at the Dickinson College Library are two scrapbooks of newspaper clippings that chronicle the activities of Zatae and Amos. There was a continua ll y unreeling variety of issues and causes that attracted their interest and energy. There were no doubt some public figures in the city of Manchester who wished at times that this pair would occasionally rest on their laurels. It probably never happened.
Zatae was enthusiastic for the outdoor s and interested in flying. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by Dickinson in 1937 on the fiftieth anniversary of her graduation. Several times she was a successful deer hunter. At least once she was on a successful "'coon" hunt. Fishing was important to her. She was a skier. On one occasion, when she was nearly sixty years of age,_ she hiked eighteen miles in four and one-half hours.
At Carlisle Dr. Hilda carried on an active practice and was involved with membership in the medical organizations. In addition she belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Carlisle Civic Club, and to other community groups. At age forty-four, in 1912, she married Dr. Guy Carlton Lee, who is credited with writing forty-five books and was active in business ventures in Carlisle. Dr. Lee built a summer home at the foot of the mountain in Penn Township along Rt. 233. Mt. Asbury was later the A. F. Blessing residence and is now owned by the Methodist Church.
Dr . Hilda was a voice student in her youth and enjoyed music throughout her life. Outdoor life was another interest she continued from her early years. She died in 1922 at the age of fifty-four from cancer of the liver.
Dr . Harold Langsdorf and his wife, Eleanor, had two children. Harold, Jr., and Helen were born in the 1890 s. Both were trained in the medical profession. Harold Jr., graduated from medical school and practiced in Mt. Holly, New Jersey, and Helen became a registered nu se. She served in France during World War I and later lived in Camp Hill after her marriage to John Mohler, a postal employee.
The Langsdorf property was the showplace of Centerville. Mature trees and shrubbery enhanced the setting. Several outbuildings completed the property. The grounds and buildings were carefully maintained.
The outbuildings which once sheltered the Doctor's horses and carriage, later held his expensive automobiles, including a Moon, a Marmon, and a Buick. Dr. Harold made the transition to the auto but never made his peace with it. It should be said that coordinating the throttle and clutch on some of that early machinery required a delicate touch.
The story is told of one occasion, when Dr. Harold had just bought a new car, of his getting someone to drive to Carlisle. The Doctor chewed tobacco and not wanting to splatter the paint, did not spit on his trip to town. At the first stop, however, he turned and delivered himself of the full charge, but the window was up!
The author remembers Dr. Langsdorf telling of coming home in his buggy through a Penn Township village at dusk on a winter evening. A child came out from a house, stopped him and asked if he could pull a tooth for the father. Dr. Harold was not a dentist but did this kind of duty when it was necessary. He went into the lamplit house and asked the patient which tooth hurt. In the shadowy light they agreed on the offending molar, and the Doctor got a hold with his forceps. Langsdorf recalled, "The tooth seemed to be coming out hard but I kept rocking it and finally it let loose. I turned around to the light to look at it and I had two! I slipped the good one into my pocket and turned to the patient with the other one . He was rolling his tongue over his gum . He said, 'Doc, that feels like a big hole!' I told him, It always feels big to your tongue." Dentistry in "the good old days!"
Through the 1930s cars were parked at the Langsdorf place during office hours, and Dr. Harold continued to make house calls. From the middle 1930's he was the jail physician.
The Doctor went quickly. In 1944 a stroke ended a life that had begun eighty- five years earlier and a medical career of sixty-two years. For the first time since 1859 there was not a Dr. Langsdorf at Centerville.
William and Lydia's children would live on into the 1970s . From the birth of William in 1834 until the death of Persis in 1975 was a two generation span of 141 years.
Today's descriptive term for the Langsdorf parents and their children might be "overachievers." They excelled academically. They abandoned social requirements that were not reasonable or fair for a more rational way. They were doers . They took their knowledge and newly claimed freedom into the real world and used it.
William and Lydia left an impressive record .
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