Frank was 28 years old when baby Eleanor Emily Hodgman arrived on December 19, 1868, his second child. He would call her “Nellie.”
Frank lived at the corner of School and Main Streets, across the street from the Hodgman family shop — retail jewelry and pharmacy — where he had worked since age 20. Upon the death of their father, his older brother Charles took the jewelry business, and Frank took the drugstore.
Their father, Francis, had prospered since he came to Littleton in 1831. He had married Mary Burns Fletcher. Both were from the southwest corner of the state (Stoddard and Amherst). Their son Charles was born in 1836 and lived in Littleton his entire life. Frank followed in 1840. They were Episcopal and Republican.
The boys shared a “handsome” inheritance per the Jackson town history. These funds, by sad fortune, would afford Frank treatment for ever-worsening tuberculosis which forced him to relinquish the trade in 1870. The disease took his life in 1876, at age 36.
Frank died when Eleanor was seven and he did not run the shop after 1870, yet it seems his example certainly inspired her. Her familiarity with the outdoors and medical matters, subjects that surface regularly in her novels, may be owed to Frank. The name Frank pops up occasionally in her novels.
Francis Fletcher Hodgman was respected as a compassionate healer and a man of science. Contemporaries would also remember him as an “ardent” young man among whose passions were music and collecting butterflies. He was an accomplished naturalist. The surrounding woods and mountains provided the medicinal plants to be gathered, dried and ground for dispensing. His butterfly collection had one-of-a-kind specimens and was acquired by Harvard University.
In the 1860s, a small-town town druggist (ie: apothecary/chemist /pharmacist) served the community in many capacities. He diagnosed maladies and prescribed remedies, as the roles of doctor and pharmacist were still intermixed. A typical shop was redolent of perfumes, spices, spermaceti, turpentine, and mint. On his shelves he displayed bottles of chemicals for tanning skins, plus dyes and oils for every purpose —alongside porcelain jars of leeches. He carried tar and paint and window glass. In the window might be a decorative glass vessel or an outstanding specimen of local taxidermy.
The druggists of Frank’s generation faced a situation when there were no hospitals in small towns. (Littleton Hospital was founded in 1906.) Guesswork was the rule until Germ Theory was acknowledged. The cause of fatal epidemics were unknown; diphtheria, TB, dysentery, typhoid, cholera were addressed with ineffectual nostrums.
In drug stores of that era there were no cigars, candy and newspapers, nor had the temperance movement brought the soda fountain to drugstores.
Francis Hodgman would have compounded soothing “plasters” and tooth powders. He prepared medicated compresses on patches of sheep skin. The recent war had shaken the medical community with unfamiliar casualties and novel treatments . Returning soldiers presented grevieous wounds, tropical fevers and near-intractable maladies of heart, mind and spirit.
The battlefields had also seen the merciful dispensing of new analgesics, notably opium derivatives like morphine and heroin, substances that found their way into patented “restoratives” for civilians in the decades to come.
Of course, alcohol was the basis of most potions and was sold in quantity. The druggist was often the town chemist — an agent who could verify the potency of rum for taverns and hotels with a hydrometer and mathematics. Their standing in the community was such that druggists were commonly exempt from conscription during the war.
Few drugs were mass-manufactured by the 1860s, save a few patent remedies. (The first “Aspirin” tablet was not introduced by Bayer until 1899.) The druggist had to roll pills with his fingertips to make little balls; he packaged them in paper pouches that he folded himself.
“Medicine shows” toured the countryside — dentists and optometrists were itinerant peddlers, too— and town druggists also carried some patent medicines. The trade in these commercial nostrums grew as mass manufacturing progressed and the spread of rail lines enabled wide distribution. A New England newspaper advertisement carried Frank’s recommendation of Dr. Wistar’s Balsam of Wild Cherry, as an “agent” of the manufacturer.
This particular medicine had been in use for some years. According to a biography of the explorer, Robert Peary’s father was prescribed Cherry Balsam on his deathbed 1859.