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Dr. J.O. Emmett
[History of the Village of Fonthill. The Fonthill Women’s Institute, 1944]
Dr J.O. Emmett’s forefathers came from Delaware, shortly after the Revolutionary War, settling in Homer with so many other U.E. Loyalists.
Their farm was situated where the new St Catharines Cemetery is located. Dr Emmett attended the St Catharines Collegiate, and when a child I have heard him say many times that in winter he and his brothers used to run most of the way to school and home again, a distance of two miles, to keep warm, overcoats being a luxury for farmers in those days.
From high school he went to New York, where he completed his medical education in two years, graduating from the New York Homeopathic College in 1863. After a year at Bellview Hospital in New York, he returned home to Canada.
He immediately looked around for a suitable place for a young doctor to establish himself and settled on Fonthill , where he came in May, 1865. It was a very hard struggle at first, having to make his calls on foot, then came a horse, which he used to ride, and next and last his faithful horse and buggy in summer, changing to a team and cutter in winter, by which methods he used to travel far and wide for the whole of his forty-nine years’ practice.It was a familiar sight to see the old doctor in winter, with a huge Scotch shawl wrapped in his own peculiar style around his head and shoulders to keep out the cold, start out for a long drive through the country with the temperature well below zero and the roads often blocked with snow.
A “Country Doctor” in those days was also counselor and friend and to show the esteem in which he was held by his practicing colleagues, the Welland County Medical Association had planned holding a testimonial banquet for him to celebrate his fiftieth anniversary in the profession.Death intervened however, and in April 1914, Dr J.O. Emmett was laid to rest, mourned by the whole countryside.
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