John Grove Speer

1890

John Grove Speer is our great-great-grandfather, maternal. He was born on February 12, 1809 in Morgantown, N.C. His father was John Speer II and his mother was Mary Barbary Grove Speer. His son Marcus Edward Speer is our great-grandfather.

John Grove lived over 100 years and was said to have had a speaking acquaintance with Abraham Lincoln. A doctor, he practiced medicine in Kentucky, Illinois, and California. He traveled west in a mule-drawn wagon during the gold-rush days of 1850. He mined for gold as well as working as a doctor and a postmaster in California. He returned to his family by coal-fired steam-sail vessel to Panama, rail across Panama, and mail steamer to New York. He wrote the book "The Speer Family" when he was 91 years old.

John Grove was brought to Kentucky when he was about two and a half years old (p65, Speer family). Naomi Nave, who was born in 1902, remembered him when he was in his 90's. Her remembrance was of him sitting in the house, and when the children got too noisy he would bang on the floor with his cane.

When he was 17-18 years old, he began studying medicine with Dr. Hiram Barton Weathers of Floydsburg, KY, spending two years with him. His duties included assisting in surgery. Then John Grove began attending the Medical School in Lexington, KY. After studying there in 1829-1830, he returned home to begin a practice of medicine. He married Sarah Eddings Snyder on Nov 11, 1830.
This is a much younger picture of John Grove Speer, courtesy of James Hitchcock. He found the photograph in a Dayton, Ohio paper published in 1909 to commemorate Lincoln's centennial. The newspaper is The Religious Telescope and this photo is in the February 17, 1909 edition, pg 7. The photo caption says that he was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln and knew him well.
This was the first time I had heard that he was born on the same day as Lincoln.

This is the photo introducing his book "Reminiscenses of the Speer Family", written by John Grove Speer when he was 91 and published in 1900.