Thirty days after the first American dictionary was registered for publication by Noah Webster and approximately a month before Simon Bolivar was proclaimed dictator of Columbia, a child was born in Maryland.
James Edmond Bennett, born May 13, 1828, eventually became an important doctor who acted as a civil war surgeon, built a prestigious practice in the Fort Smith area and sired a son who was also very important in the history of Western Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.
The Bennett family was prominent in Somerset County, Maryland during the years of and after the American Revolution. Colonel Anthony Bennett, the father of James, was born in 1794 and his family had been instrumental in the organization of militias that stood up against the British just two decades earlier.
His mother, who may have died in childbirth, is not named on any documents we were able to uncover.
James was a graduate of the University of Maryland and began the practice of medicine in Sharpstown, Maryland in 1855 at the age of twenty-seven.
In 1861, James married Martha A. Taylor of Maryland and by 1862, James and Martha, his father, and sister Mary had joined the progression west and the family ended up in the vicinity of Wyandotte, Kansas.
Shortly after his marriage, with the Civil War heating up throughout much of the south, James became a surgeon for the United States Army. Recruited to the third regiment of the Fourteenth Kansas Cavalry by then Lieutenant Colonel James G. Blunt, he was on the battlefield at the Battle of Baxter Springs in Kansas when Quantrill's Raiders defeated the Union Army.
Blunt was responsible for leading the "Indian Expedition" in 1863 which allowed the Union to capture Fort Gibson and put together three regiments of Indian soldiers.
Bennett also served with honor at the Battle of Prairie Grove and the Battle of Westport in Missouri.
It was in 1863 when he came to Fort Smith as part of Blunt's command that he found the place that he would eventually call home.
Two children were born of the union of James and Martha. Leo Bennett, who eventually became a doctor and an important figure in the history of eastern Oklahoma as well as a daughter, Mary, had both been born in Kansas between 1857 and 1860.
Bennett was esteemed in Fort Smith as a physician and a philanthropist. He practiced medicine in the Fort Smith community for twenty-one years before his death. He was a member of a number of lodges and fraternal organizations.
A contemporary news article at the time of his death said he was "remarkably charitable in his practice and would answer a call is promptly from the least pauper in the land as he would from one possessed of wealth and would give the same attention that he would had been expecting for a princely fee."
Bennett also served as postmaster in Fort Smith during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant.
Shortly before noon on Friday the week before his death Dr Bennett suffered what was diagnosed as a brain hemorrhage.
He regained consciousness the following Monday when he conversed rationally for approximately three hours.
Just after noon on Monday, September 16, 1884 he lost consciousness again and from that point begin gradually sinking, dying at 3 pm that afternoon among his family members at the age of fifty-seven.
His funeral, which was held the day after his death, caused quite the sensation in Fort Smith.
The procession was headed up by Stroeper's brass band followed by the mounted Knights of Templar. Marching behind that organization was the Grand Army of the Republic, Knights of Honor, and Bellevue Lodge A. F. & A. M. followed by the hearse carrying the body of the doctor.
Over 1000 people on foot also followed the solemn parade down Garrison Avenue, turning west to go to the US National Cemetery.
Bennett was laid to rest in the Fort Smith National Cemetery in Section 3, Site 1519.
His whitewashed monument bears his name, his associated efforts of the Civil War and the date of his death.
Dr. Bennett's son, Leo, became a prominent Indian agent, landowner in both Arkansas and Oklahoma, and served as an influential editor of the Muskogee Phoenix after buying that newspaper in 1888.
Dr. Leo Bennett's story can be better told in a subsequent article under the "Stone Garden" headline.
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