Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/63

 was, as I have already written, the first to urge publicly the preservation of the camp ground of Valley Forge by the nation or state, as a park. His reputation as a physician extended widely. At this time the Philadelphia College of Medicine was about to be reorganized. Among its professors were Doctors Henry Hartshorne, James L. Tyson, Joseph Parrish and B. Howard Rand. One of them, Dr. Henry Geiger, who afterward went into the wholesale grocery business and street railways and became very wealthy, came to Phœnixville and urged my father to take the leading chair of Theory and Practice. He concluded to make the venture. His Phœnixville house was rented to David Reeves, the iron master, and in 1854 the family, which then consisted of my father and mother, my brothers, Henry C. and Isaac R., aged eight and two years respectively, and myself, aged eleven, moved to the city and boarded with John J. Phillips and his wife, old-fashioned Quaker people, on the south side of Wood Street between Seventh and Eighth. I had only been in Philadelphia once before and it meant to me a confused noise, fruit stands at the corners of the streets, and advertising signs which read in one way from a certain point, but mysteriously changed to something else as you passed them. I had only one acquaintance in the town, James Henry Workman, a boy about my own age, who was later a member of the shipping firm of Workman & Co., on Walnut Street, and a captain in Rush's Lancers during the war, grievously wounded and a prisoner. Boarding in the house, however, were two of my cousins considerably older than myself, Edmund L. Whitaker and Nelson E. Whitaker, the latter of whom is now president of the Whitaker Iron Company of Wheeling, West Virginia, has been a state senator and urged for the United States Senate. They were sons of my great-uncle, George P. Whitaker, who lived at Principio Furnace in Maryland, and who, in partnership with my grandfather, owned that furnace and a tract of about twelve Rh