Stone Gardens: A prominent physician with ties to Fort Smith helped shape the medical and civic life of the region
Dr. Albert Dunlap was born on December 8, 1828, the son of Joseph Pickney Dunlap, a North Carolina native and mechanic, and Mildred Jones Dunlap. Sources place his birth in either Tennessee or Alabama, and the family later settled in Washington County where he grew to adulthood.
He attended the Ozark Institute at Mount Comfort. In 1850, he began medical studies under Dr. Thomas J. Pollard in Fayetteville and lived with his parents in Prairie Township. He earned his M.D. from the medical department of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1851, with a thesis titled An Inaugural Dissertation on Malaria. By 1852 he had established a practice in Fort Smith, and became a charter member of the Sebastian County Medical Society.
Census records show him practicing in Fort Smith by 1860, living in a hotel. With the outbreak of the Civil War he entered Confederate service. On August 11, 1861, he was surgeon of the 4th Arkansas State Infantry. He received payment for acting assistant surgeon duty in Fayetteville and for transporting medicines.
In early 1862 he served at the hospital in Bentonville, was appointed surgeon in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States to rank from late 1861, and was ordered to the 17th Arkansas Infantry. He worked at St. Johns College Hospital in Little Rock, serving as surgeon in charge, post surgeon, and member of medical examining boards that evaluated wounded officers for continued service.
Confederate Senate confirmation came in 1863. Later he was surgeon for the District of Arkansas under General Holmes and by late 1864 was surgeon in charge of the hospital at Washington in Hempstead County. His wartime papers at the University of Arkansas include financial accounts for hospitals at Monticello and Washington.
A brother, Rufus A. Dunlap, also served as a Confederate physician.
After the war he returned to private practice in Fort Smith, partnering at times with his father-in-law, Dr. Nicholas Spring. He served about twenty years on the Fort Smith Board of Health, was president of the Sebastian County Medical Society in 1887, and vice president of the Arkansas Medical Society.
He belonged to the American Medical Association and the International Medical Congress, examined for pensions and life insurance, and by 1889 was noted as the oldest practicing physician in Fort Smith.
On December 7, 1873, he married Virginia Cabell Spring, daughter of Dr. Nicholas Spring. The couple had no children of their own but raised Maud and Albert, the children of his brother Dudley Clinton Dunlap after their mother died.
Maud, born in 1873, became the second woman pharmacist registered in Arkansas, worked with her uncle in a Winslow drugstore, married Gilbert N. Duncan in 1908, and with him published the Winslow American. After her husband’s death she continued the paper for decades and in 1925 was elected mayor of Winslow with an all-woman city council known as the petticoat government.
In the late 1880s, Dr. Dunlap and his wife moved to Winslow in the Boston Mountains. He established a health resort at about 2000 feet elevation, chosen for clean air, moderate summer temperatures, pure waters, and railroad access on the St. Louis and San Francisco line roughly forty-two miles from Fort Smith.
He considered it the greatest enterprise of his life and believed it would become a leading Southern health destination. The family helped organize a public school district, donating land and a building, and established St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and cemetery, donating the lot.
Their granddaughter Helen died young; the family later donated the Boston Heights residence so that the Episcopal Diocese and the Daughters of the American Revolution could open the Helen Dunlap Memorial School for Mountain Girls, a mountain mission school that operated into the 1930s.
By 1900 he was still listed as a physician in Winslow, living with his wife, a daughter, and a granddaughter. The 1910 census shows him retired and living on his own income.
His father died at his Winslow home in 1897. Dr. Dunlap died on December 4, 1910, four days short of his eighty-second birthday, and was buried in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Cemetery in Winslow.
His wife Virginia lived until 1936 and is buried beside him. Surviving records, including his ledgers and contemporary biographies, portray a physician who practiced across four decades, served through the entire war in the Trans Mississippi Department, and helped shape both the medical and civic life of Fort Smith and the mountain community of Winslow.
