Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Woman Doctor's Civil War Esther Hill Hawks' Diary by Esther Hill Hawks A Woman Doctor's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks' Diary by Esther Hill Hawks. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #f11665f0-cf12-11eb-a4e5-4569fbaa0d5f VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Thu, 17 Jun 2021 02:23:02 GMT. A Woman Doctor's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks' Diary by Esther Hill Hawks. The Civil War started on April 12, 1861. Since most men were fighting in the Civil War, women had to work as doctors, nurses, or caregivers. About 5,000 women volunteered to be nurses during this time. Dr. Esther Hill Hawks and her husband were doctors at the time. Esther helped take care of black soldiers in the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Colored Infantry. That was a hospital for the men that were fighting then. She provided medical care for black soldiers and worked as a physician in General Hospital Number 10. The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 and lasted for almost four years. Civil War Women Doctors. It is unclear how many women were working as physicians in the United States before the Civil War. At that time, medical students commonly studied under an established physician and did not attend a formal medical school. Many women learned their medical skills from husbands and fathers, and then assisted the men in private practice. During the antebellum years, an unknown number of women attended medical school dressed in male attire and went on to practice medicine, while still pretending to be men. Most women doctors served in a nursing capacity during the Civil War because they were not allowed to function as physicians. While many male and female practitioners who graduated from unorthodox medical schools applied for admission to the Medical Corps of both armies, they were rejected. In desperation, a delegation of male homeopaths appealed directly to President Abraham Lincoln, but he would not support their application for army appointments. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell When the Civil War broke out, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell – the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States – realized the Union Army would need a system for distributing supplies. Blackwell and her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell organized four thousand women in New York City into the Women’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR), which collected and distributed blankets, food, clothing and medical supplies. In June 1861, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln, the federal government formed a national version of the WCAR which became the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), which oversaw nurse training, coordinated volunteer efforts and provided battlefront hospital and kitchen services. Although most of the USSC’s officers and agents were men, the vast majority of its tens of thousands of volunteers were women, including Almira Fales, Eliza Porter and Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell also partnered with several prominent male physicians in New York City to offer a one-month training course at Bellevue Hospital for 100 women who wanted to be nurses for the Union army. This was the first formal training for women nurses in the country. Once they completed their training, they were sent to Dorothea Dix for placement at a hospital. Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler The first African American doctor in the United States, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler received her medical degree in 1864 from the New England Female Medical College. No images survive of Dr. Crumpler. What is know of her comes from the introduction to her book, a remarkable record of her achievements as a physician at a time when very few African Americans were able to gain admittance to medical college. Her Book of Medical Discourses (1883) is one of the first medical publications by an African American. Though she did not serve with the army during the Civil War, she was active immediately after the war ended. When Richmond, Virginia surrendered to Union troops in April 1865, she went to the city to work with volunteer agencies at the contraband camp there. Crumpler believed that Richmond would be: a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children. During my stay there nearly every hour was improved in that sphere of labor. The last quarter of the year 1866, I was enabled… to have access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored. Crumpler joined other black physicians caring for freed slaves who would otherwise have had no access to medical care, working with the Freedmen’s Bureau, and missionary and community groups, even though black physicians experienced intense racism working in the postwar South. She subsequently returned to Boston where she ran a medical practice for several years, specializing in caring for women and children. Dr. Esther Hill Hawks and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker were among a pioneering group of medical professionals who attended orthodox medical schools and offered their services for frontline duty during the Civil War. They received a hostile reception from their male counterparts, who firmly believed that field medicine was a male environment. Undeterred, these feisty females continued to flout society’s idea of a woman’s place. Dr. Esther Hill Hawks After marrying Dr. John Milton Hawks, Esther Hill Hawks studied his medical books and decided to go to medical school. Graduating from New England Medical College for Women in 1857, she practiced in various locales with her husband. After the Sea Islands along the coast of South Carolina and the surrounding areas were occupied by Union forces, Dr. John Hawks got a job providing medical care and running a plantation set up for freed slaves. Dr. Esther Hill Hawks – a Northerner, a teacher, a suffragist, an abolitionist and one of America’s first female physicians – was the very antithesis of Southern womanhood. Nevertheless, she joined her husband and assisted him as much as the Union Army would allow, but her primary role remained primarily that of a teacher with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. During the war years she lived in and around Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida. Dr. Hawks recorded her Civil War experiences in a diary from 1862 to 1866, in which she described the South she saw, conquered but still proud. She helped in establishing General Hospital Number 10 for black soldiers. Hawks cared for soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the first black regiment recruited in the free states, after its famous ill-fated attempt to take Fort Wagner under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. After the war, Hawks continued to work in the area, caring for former slaves and teaching school. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker When the Civil War began in earnest during the spring of 1861, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker responded by shutting down her practice, writing that she “was confident that the God of justice would not allow the war to end without its developing into a war of liberation.” She set out for Washington, DC and found a city overrun with soldiers wounded during the Battle of Bull Run, and an insufficient number of medical professionals struggling to treat them. She went straight to Secretary of War Simon Cameron and presented herself as a willing and able surgeon. Cameron found her clothing (a modified Bloomer costume) – a shortened dress atop slacks – totally absurd and would not consider commissioning a woman for any rank above nurse. However, Walker was determined to be useful, and her services were readily accepted by Dr. J.N. Green, the lone surgeon of the Indiana Hospital, a makeshift infirmary hastily set up inside the unfinished U.S. Patent Office. Eager for Walker to be compensated, Green requested that Surgeon General Clement A. Finley formally appoint her assistant surgeon, but he refused. Entangled in a long divorce with a philandering husband who impregnated at least two patients, Walker was not a woman of means, but she returned to work, politely refusing to share Green’s salary. In 1861, the Sanitary Commission recommended amputations be conducted when a limb had serious lacerations or compound fractures, but the practice was controversial. Nearly 60 percent of leg amputations done at the knee resulted in death, while less than 20 percent survived hip-level amputations. Walker observed her colleagues senselessly amputating limbs. She wrote, “It was the last case that would ever occur if it was in my power to prevent such cruel loss of limbs.” She began surreptitiously counseling soldiers against the surgery when appropriate. Many wrote her thankful letters after the war, reporting their limbs to be fully functional. Word quickly spread about Dr. Walker’s kindness to soldiers. Knowing she was bold and skilled, anxious families begged her to seek out their injured relatives, marooned near raging battles. In an 1862 letter published in The Sibyl , Walker wrote: It is literally impossible for one with any force of character and humanity to remain ‘in the background,’ when convinced by knowledge and reason, that their mission is evidently one that will result in great good in those whose necessities demand that they have not the power to gain for themselves… Dr. Walker began writing endless letters requesting an official post, and received just as many refusals. Yet she continued to treat wounded soldiers, and military surgeons and generals on the ground were grateful for her help. Dr. Preston King described Walker’s contributions in the aftermath of a brutal defeat at Fredericksburg which resulted in 13,000 casualties, but the secretary of war responded that there could never be a commission for her, as there was no “authority of law for making this allowance to you.” Walker designed a blue uniform for herself, replete with a green sash, the sign of a physician on the battlefield. The New York Tribune wrote in December 1862: Dressed in male habiliments…she carries herself amid the camp with a jaunty air of dignity well calculated to receive the sincere respect of the soldiers… She can amputate a limb with the skill of an old surgeon, and administer medicine equally as well. Strange to say that, although she has frequently applied for a permanent position in the medical corps, she has never been formally assigned to any particular duty. Dr. Walker was now famous, and the Tribune continued to criticize the military’s reluctance to recognize her efforts, asking, “If a woman is proved competent for duty, and anxious to perform it, why restrain her?” Even President Abraham Lincoln would not invite a national controversy by appointing a female physician to the Union Army, even one he knew had been acting in such capacity on nearly half a dozen battlefields. In 1864, Lincoln wrote a carefully worded letter to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker: The Medical Department of the army is an organized system in the hands of men supposed to be learned in that profession and I am sure it would injure the service for me, with strong hand, to thrust among them anyone, male or female, against their consent. After Assistant Surgeon General Robert C. Wood observed in person Walker’s work during the Chickamauga Campaign, she was formally named the only female acting assistant surgeon in the United States Army and was assigned to the 52nd Ohio Volunteers, and offered a contract salary of $80 a month. For the first time, Walker wore the sanctioned dress of a Union military surgeon. Proud of her accomplishment, she wrote, “I let my curls grow while I was in the army so that everybody would know that I was a woman.” She was regularly sent on missions outside of Union lines, armed with two revolvers in her saddle, but her orders were not entirely medical in nature. On April 10, 1864, Walker was taken prisoner as a Union spy by Confederate soldiers under General Dana Harvey Hill. Five days later, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered all women to leave Union battlefields, but by then Walker had been sent to Castle Thunder Prison in Virginia. Her reputation preceded her, and the imprisoned “female Yankee surgeon” was openly ridiculed in Virginia papers. Both the Confederate and Union armies were desperate for physicians, and on August 12, 1863, Dr. Walker was exchanged for a male physician. She had now served as a physician at Indiana Hospital, Bull Run, Warrenton, Fredericksburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga and Atlanta, but securing another commission required renewing the letter-writing campaign. She was finally sent to Louisville to be the head surgeon at the Female Military Prison, but the Confederate women kept there often refused her services. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was released back to the 52nd Ohio as a contract surgeon, but spent the rest of the war practicing at the Louisville female prison and an orphan’s asylum in Tennessee. On June 15, 1865, Walker requested that her military service conclude, and the army readily granted her request. She was paid $766.16 for her wartime service. Afterward, she got a monthly pension of $8.50, later raised to $20, but still less than some widows’ pensions. Lesser Known Civil War Women Doctors Among the women physicians who served was Dr. Orianna Moon Andrews of Virginia, who graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1857. She married fellow Southerner Dr. John Summerfield Andrews in 1861 and records show that she began to serve as his nurse, but further research suggests she did considerably more than some of the medical men of the time cared to admit. During the Civil War, Dr. Andrews devoted herself to the cause of wounded Southerners. Charlottesville, Virginia was a hospital center during the Civil War and Dr. Orianna Moon Andrews assisted in turning several University of Virginia buildings into hospital units. Her efforts were recognized by her award of a surgeon’s commission as a captain in the Confederate Army – reputedly the only one given to a woman. Dr. Chloe Annette Buckel graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1856, and worked with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Emily Blackwell as a physician at the New York Infirmary in New York City. She left her position there to volunteer her services and was chosen to select and train nurses for the Union army – apparently neither the North or the South wanted to employ qualified women as physicians. In 1862 Buckel joined a company of nurses and surgeons traveling to Memphis, where she assisted in establishing hospitals in stores and warehouses. After the war, Buckel relocated to California, where she co-founded a hospital for women and children in San Francisco, and was one of the few women doctors in the state. Dr. Sarah Ann Chadwick Clapp was appointed assistant surgeon of the 7th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry and served in that position between November 1861 and August 1862. She also served as assistant surgeon and surgeon in general hospitals in Cairo, Illinois and aboard transport ships. However, the medical examining board refused to give her an examination and she never received a commission or pay for her War work. Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana appointed Dr. Mary Frame Thomas to hospital service during the Civil War, and she worked alongside her husband, a contract surgeon stationed at the Army Hospital at Nashville, Tennessee. Under this appointment Dr. Thomas served in Washington and elsewhere, and later provided special hospital service in Nashville under the direction of the United States Christian Commission, an organization that furnished supplies and medical services to Union troops. Medical Education for Women With the rise of the women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century and greater wartime demands for their services, women’s socially sanctioned role as family nursemaids evolved into greater professional opportunities and medical training. Image: 1870 cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper celebrates the competence and dedication of the first generation of women medical students. Frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining medical and hospital training for women, Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857. This hospital and its adjacent Medical College for Women, which the Blackwells established in 1867, provided women doctors with a complete education on a par with the best medical colleges of the day. The rigorous curriculum included the first course in hygiene (public health and preventive medicine) offered anywhere in the country. The 1870 census counted 525 trained women doctors in America – more than in the rest of the world combined. However, the large majority of these were practitioners of eclectic medicine, an officially recognized branch of North American medicine that predominantly used Native American herbs. These practitioners were eclectic in the sense that they integrated whatever worked, including herbal medicine and homeopathy. Only 137 women were enrolled in regular medical schools, and most of these were in separate women’s medical colleges around the country. Women were not permitted to attend Harvard Medical School until 1945. Healing Women of the Civil War. The women healers of the 1800s, like the ones before them, learned their art primarily from their mother, grandmother, or another experienced mentor. The teaching methods used by the more formal mentor-healers were usually rigorous and structured. Because women were excluded from learning medicine from the medical universities, they learned from other sources and formed their own meeting groups where they could share healing experiences. One way to continue healing traditions was through written records called “Receipt Books.” HIGHLIGHT. Dr. Oriana Moon Andrews, Confederate Doctor. Growing up in a wealthy, aristocratic family gave Oriana advantages that most young women of her time did not enjoy. She was further aided by a father who hired the finest tutors for his children, and allowed his daughters to choose their own pursuits. This enabled Oriana to eventually become a medical doctor. In 1854, Orrie enrolled in the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. After writing her thesis on the relationship between cardiac and pulmonary diseases, Orie was awarded her Doctor of Medicine in 1857. After extended adventures in Egyptian lands, precipitated by the desire to travel there with her uncle and be of possible medical assistance to the Bedouins, she attended to family, servants and female patients when she returned to the United States, When the Civil War began in 1861, Orie volunteered her medical services to the Confederacy: Dr. Orie was praised for her war efforts. This quote is taken from a report on physicians arriving to help at Charlottesville General Hospital, “Thanks to the energy and zeal displayed on all sides, order begins to reign and system to prevail amid the immense number (of wounded pouring in). More physicians have arrived from other towns, among them Dr. Alexander Rives, late house-surgeon of Bellevue Hospital, New York, and Dr. Moon, a young lady of the neighborhood, to whose skillful and experienced hands the care of a ward has been entrusted.” One unfortunate review by an obviously biased male physician, Edward Warren, M.D. in his book stated the reflection of too many other males at the time: “She was a lady of high character and of fine intelligence, and, though she failed to distinguish herself as a physician, she made an excellent nurse, and did good service in the wards of the hospital. Unfortunately for her professional prospects, she fell in love with one of our assistant surgeons and compromised matters by marrying him and devoting herself to the care of her own babies—like a sensible woman. “In my humble judgment, no one possessing a womb or endowed with the attributes of femininity ought to dream of entering the ranks of the medical professor and Dr. Moon’s experiences at Charlottesville teaches a lesson in this regard which her aspiring sisters would do well to heed and appreciate.” Doctors who worked beside Dr. Orie in the Charlottesville General Hospital, however, grew to respect her medical skills and dedication. In a 1913 letter written by Dr. Peter Winston, who ran a ward next to Dr.. Orie, he described her as a young woman who did “efficient service at the bedsides and in the surgical wards.” The scenes of suffering in the University hallways were horrific, but Dr. Orie stopped from her patients’ care only long enough to get a few hours rest a day. In early 1870, she moved with her husband William Andrews and their two sons to Tennessee where they lived in a humble house near a small village of 300 African Americans. Orie’s missionary spirit was inspired and she soon led inspiring talks in front of her home in a makeshift. outdoor church. All summer she taught them to sing and pray, and urged them to a better life—to be all that they could be. After several years of ill health, in the early morning of December 24, 1883, Dr. Oriana Moon Andrews died of pneumonia. At her request she was buried on December 26 th in the Scottsville Presbyterian Cemetery (now Scottsville Cemetery). To learn more about women nurses and healers in the American Civil War, visit Amazon.com to purchase the book! Two months after the war began Secretary of War Simon Cameron appointed Dorothea Dix as Superintendent of Women Nurses for the Union. In August 1861 Congress authorized the Surgeon General to employ female nurses in Army hospitals, and to pay them $12 a month and provide them with food rations. THE VIVANDIERES. Nurses of the Civil War. HIGHLIGHT. Chloe Annette Buckel. Dr. Chloe Annette Buckel was born in Warsaw, New York on August 25, 1833 and graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1858 , with her thesis on insanity and chose Chicago for the location of her first medical practice. She worked with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Emily Blackwell as a physician at the New York Infirmary in New York City. Five years later she left her position there, at the behest of General Ulysses S. Grant to organize his field hospitals. Although she was already a medical doctor, when Dr. Buckel heard of the tremendous need for nurses to treat injured Civil War soldiers, she volunteered to Govenor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana in 1863. Since “apparently neither the North or the South wanted to employ qualified women as physicians” Gov. Morton sent her to Tennessee to “look after the condition and wants of Indiana’s sick and wounded [Union] soldiers.” While there, Dr. Buckel set up six field hospitals in stores and warehouses and in December 1863 the Army’s Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes sent her “to visit the U.S. General Hospitals in the Southwest for the purpose of consulting with Medical Directors and Surgeons in charge upon the selection & appointment of Female Nurses” and was charged with appointing any persons she recommended. It appears that by September 1864 Dr. Buckel was in Louisville, Kentucky where she was the agent for Dorothea Dix in the selection and assignment of Army nurses. Following that position, she was appointed Chief of the female nurses at Jefferson General Hospital in Indiana where she served the remainder of the Civil War. Throughout her Civil War service, she was referred to as “Miss Buckel” and not “Dr, Buckel,” although she was remembered by those with whom she served as “The Little Major.” Moving to Oakland in 1877 due to ill health, Dr. Buckel opened her own medical practice and became the first woman admitted to the Alameda County Medical Association in June 1878. She was also appointed a consulting physician at the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children, which was founded in 1875. Later in life, Dr. Buckel’s increasing concern for children’s welfare led to positions as Trustee and Chaiarman for Francis M. “Borax” Smith’s homes for orphans and girls. She founded the Home Club, a women’s association in Oakland, and formed a pure milk commission which worked to exclude cows with tuberculosis from supplying milk to local dairies. The Agassiz Society was another organization founded by Dr. Buckel, which encouraged children in the study of nature. The 1910 census lists her as living in Piedmont with Charlotte Playter, daughter of the former Oakland mayor, Ely W. Plater, and describes her relationship as “friend”. She died August 17, 1912, just days before her 79 th birthday. The inscription on her gravestone reads: “A physician beloved by two generations. Every human cause had her sympathy and many her active aid.” She left her estate to benefit “backward and feeble-minded children” through Stanford University. HIGHLIGHT. Dr. Esther Hill Hawks. She was born on August 5, 1833, in Hooksett, New Hampshire. After she married Dr. John Milton Hawks, Esther Hill Hawks studied his medical books and decided that medical school was for her. After she graduated from New England Medical College for Women in 1857, she practiced in different areas with her husband. She was one of the first female physicians in the United States. After the Sea Islands were occupied by Union forces, Dr. John Hawks got a job providing medical care and running a plantation set up for freed slaves. Dr. Esther Hawks, who was a Northerner a teacher, suffragist, abolitionist and one of America’s first female physicians, was the antithesis of Southern womanhood. Nevertheless, she joined her husband and assisted him as much as the Union Army would allow. Because she was not allowed to be a surgeon in the army, Esther volunteered to be a nurse. Her application was rejected by Dorothea Dix, Superintendent of Army Nurses. In order to prevent sending vulnerable young women into hospitals where she feared they might be exploited by the men there (doctors and patients alike), Dix set strict guidelines. Her nurses had to be between 35 and 50 years old and plain looking. Hawks was just 28 and attractive. Her primary role, however, remained that of a teacher with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. She was assigned to educate the soldiers of the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers and their families. This was the first official Union Army regiment organized with African American soldiers in the Civil War. It was composed of escaped slaves from South Carolina and Florida. During the war she lived in and around Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida. Dr. Hawks listed her Civil War experiences in a diary from 1862 to 1866, in which she described the South she saw, conquered but still proud. In 1863, when her husband was ordered to accompany a secret mission to the coast of Florida, Dr. Esther Hawks took charge of the newly built General Hospital Number 10 for African American soldiers on Hilton Head. This huge hospital had a floor area of 60,000 square feet. She cared for soldiers from the 54 th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the first black regiment recruited in the free states, after its famous ill-fated attempt to take Fort Wagner. I am left manager of not only the affairs of the hospital, but have to attend surgeon’s call for the 2 nd (South Carolina Volunteers), so every morning at 9 o’clock the disabled are marched down to the hospital in charge of a Seargeant and I hold surgeon’s call for hospital and Regt. and with great success; on the back piazza, sending some to duty and taking into the hospital such as need extra care. After the war, Dr. Hawks continued to work in the area, caring for former slaves and teaching school. Dr. Esther Hill Hawks died on May 6, 1906 in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was buried in Manchester, New Hampshire. John Milton Hawks. John Milton Hawks (1826 - 1910) was an abolitionist, surgeon and organizer for the assistance of freed blacks and black soldiers during the U.S. Civil War as well as a businessman and Florida settler in Volusia County. During Reconstruction he was secretary of the board of registration for Volusia County. He was also clerk of the Florida House of Representatives from 1868 to 1870. A plaque in his honor is located at the Edgewater City Hall at 104 North Riverside Drive in Edgewater, Florida. [1] Hawks wrote The East Coast of Florida: A Descriptive Narrative , published in 1887 by L.J. Sweett [2] and/ or Lewis & Winsship. [3] He is listed as a Great Floridian. His wife, Esther Jane (Hill) Hawks (1833 - 1906), was also a doctor and helped educate black soldiers and their families. [4] [5] She was an 1857 graduate of the New England Female Medical College. [6] In addition to being a physician, Hawks was an author, historian, teacher, newspaper publisher, army officer, orange grower, first superintendent of Volusia County Schools and founder of Hawks Park, later renamed Edgewater Park. Esther's diary was found in an attic in 1975 and published as A Woman Doctor's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks' Diary . It was edited by Gerald Schwartz and covers a period before the Hawks settled in Florida. [7] Hawks was born on November 26, 1826 in Bradford, New Hampshire [8] to Colburn and Clarissa Brown Hawks. He passed the teacher's exam at age 15, studied medicine two years later while teaching in Georgia and received his medical degree in 1847. [5] Hawks was a doctor and staunch abolitionist in Manchester, New Hampshire until volunteering as a physician to treat freed black soldiers during the Civil War. [8] In December 1861 he volunteered as a physician in South Carolina to treat escaped slaves [1] in Sea Islands, South Carolina. [7] He established a school for the freed blacks [6] and "recruited most of the 33rd Colored Troops for the Union Army then served as their physician" and "was one of the first to urge emancipation of the slaves and to use them as soldiers." [5] He was appointed Assistant Surgeon with the rank of Major in the Union Army's 33rd Colored Troops. [5] Hawks was then appointed Surgeon of the 21st Colored Troops [5] and practiced in Jacksonville, Florida in 1872 after his service in the U.S. Civil War. He treated former slaves and freedmen, who he had also advocated for before the war. [1] Hawks advocated for creation of the first Freeman's Saving Banks. In 1865 he helped found the Florida Land and Lumber Company with other officers. [7] The business provided homes and jobs for freed slaves. He named the business's settlement for freed blacks Port Orange, and some of the families remained in the area now known as Freemanville. [8] Most of the homesteads were located north of Spruce Creek and northwest of the inlet, near Dunlawton. Its first post office was built in 1867 in what is now the town of Ponce Inlet and was moved a few miles north in 1868. [7] Esther taught with the Freedmen's Aid Society and may have established the first integrated school in Florida. [7] Sandy soil proved a challenge and corruption is believed to have caused supplies to be stolen before being delivered to the settlement which soon failed. A report found the colonists who remained in poor condition and surviving by eating coutee or coontie (the starchy roots of a native plant), palmetto cabbage and fish they caught. [7] Esther continued teaching after the colony's decline, but in January 1869 a new schoolhouse was torched and in 1870 she returned to New England to practice medicine. Eighty-three blacks remained in the eastern part of Volusia County. [7] Hawks planted an orange grove south of Port Orange on the Indian River and established Hawks Park in 1871, [5] it was renamed Edgewater by the Florida State Legislature in 1924. Henry Tolliver, a successful black homesteader, and Hannah Tolliver owned land in the northwest corner of Port Orange. Some of the former colonists lived on their land in a community later dubbed Freemanville. Tolliver made molasses and grew corn, cotton, peas, beans and sweet potatoes. His wife made and sold clothing. [7] Hawks died April 2, 1910 and was buried in Hawks Park Cemetery in Volusia County. [9] It was later renamed Edgewater New Smyrna Cemetery and is located in what is now Edgewater, Florida at plot location Old North, Section 3. A monument to the couple is also located in Pine Grove Cemetery in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1924 Hawks Park was renamed Edgewater. [9]