Lost, and Other Adventures of Dr. Frank O’Connor

Not every story begins with a dramatic discovery or a remarkable revelation. Sometimes it begins with a laugh. While browsing through the Washington County Independent from 1874, I came across this item:

“Lost. Frank O’Connor went to Cornelius and stayed till after dark. He started home but got lost. He says his horse left the road and went stumbling and pitching over ruts, hog-holes and everything else. Sometimes he was on the horse and sometimes the horse was on him. The horse took him into the brush and logs. He says, ‘I was scared; didn’t know where in thunder I would fetch up.’ He finally, by crawling around, got into a road that led him out again. When he got home, he pitched over an old stove left in front of Wehring’s and went through the window. Frank’s hair looks as though it was turning gray. He says darn a doctor’s business if it is all like that.”

Naturally, I wanted to know more about Frank O’Connor.

The Young Doctor

My first impression from the newspaper coverage of Frank was that he seemed to be painted in a somewhat different light than the other area doctors of the time. I found myself wondering whether his abilities simply were not respected, or whether he was some kind of quack, or both. The answer revealed itself once further research turned up that Frank was only twenty years old in 1875, when most of these articles were written.

How did someone become a doctor at twenty? At the time, the most common paths were to attend a medical school, where students completed two four-month sessions before apprenticing under an established physician, to skip the schooling entirely and apprentice under another doctor, or to purchase a diploma outright from a diploma mill. Which path Frank took remains unknown.

Frank had been appointed Postmaster of Hillsboro in 1875 but resigned not long after, with Miss Mary Brown taking over as Postmistress. Perhaps he resigned because he had decided to try his luck in Cornelius. Later that year it was reported that a pair of fine and valuable boots had been stolen from him out of the bar room of the St. Joseph Hotel, where he was living at the time.

The local papers kept a fond and somewhat amused eye on young Frank throughout 1875. One item noted: “Dr. O’Connor still lingers in Cornelius on his professional visit. Rumor says Frank intends starting a drug store here. Cornelius is sadly in need of another drug store. One more would just about supply the demand for licorice and ‘chewin’ wax.'” Frank never did open that store.

Another item was more generous: “Dr. O’Connor is still in Cornelius, and I expect he will live and die in this place. I don’t know whether he gets much practice or not, but I think he understands his business.”

By the end of 1875, Frank had made a change. He was working at the warehouse across from the St. Joseph Hotel, as this item makes plain: “Colonel Cornelius is receiving wheat at the warehouse daily now. Jack Elton and Dr. O’Connor are sack manipulators. The Doctor has abandoned the practice of medicine. The profession has not proven a success to Frank, and he has adopted the calling of a ’tiller of the soil.'”

After 1875, Frank O’Connor disappeared from the local papers entirely, a reliable sign that he had left the area. That stumped me for a while. I expanded my search to nearby towns and eventually found him again, this time in Lafayette, near McMinnville.

Lafayette

It was in Lafayette that Frank O’Connor finally found his footing.

He opened a drug store, which turned out to suit him considerably better than doctoring in Cornelius had. And it was there that he met Miss Ada Watts, daughter of Dr. John W. Watts, an influential citizen of Lafayette. They married in January 1881, with Ada’s father, who was also a minister, performing the ceremony. Frank and Ada had a son, George, in 1882, and a daughter, Mary, in 1884.

In 1883, Frank sold his drug store to a doctor from Eugene City, though he continued working as a druggist until 1887. He then launched a new venture, an express stagecoach offering passenger, baggage, and freight service twice daily between Lafayette and the end of the Southern Pacific line at St. Joseph. After a year he sold that business too, possibly for health reasons, and traveled to the coast to rest and recuperate.

Frank O’Connor contracted tuberculosis. He died in 1889 at the age of thirty-three.

Ada remarried in 1891 but died in 1904 of heart trouble at the age of forty-three. Frank and Ada lie together in Lafayette.

He packed a great deal into thirty-three years. A lost ride home through the dark on a stumbling horse. Boots stolen from a hotel bar room. Wheat sacks at Colonel Cornelius’s warehouse. A drug store and a stagecoach line and a good marriage and two children and the Oregon coast in his last year.

“Sometimes he was on the horse and sometimes the horse was on him.”

Rest well, Frank.