Dr. Taylor F. Ealy

Dr. Taylor Fillmore Ealy
Dr. Taylor Fillmore Ealy was born September 12, 1848, in Schellsburg, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children of J. C. Ealy and his wife Ann, herself a doctor. The 1850 census recorded another man under their roof: a 22 year old physician. From that household a boy would rise who became physician, preacher, missionary, and witness to one of the bloodiest range wars in the American West.
Taylor proved a promising student at Washington and Jefferson College and graduated in the fall of 1872. He pursued medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and took his degree in 1874. Soon after, he married Mary Clark. Called to medical missionary work, he preached from pulpit to pulpit until the Presbyterian committee of missions sent him to the Chickasaw Nation to educate Black students and aid freedmen. With Mary he traveled to Oklahoma. There they had two daughters. From 1874 to 1876 he administered the school for Black children at Fort Arbuckle, building a place of learning his students valued. When the Baptist church took over the school after two years, he moved on.After a brief stay at El Morro, the couple traveled by wagon into New Mexico and arrived at the center of a battlefield: Lincoln, 1878. The night before, they had lodged at Fort Stanton, where they learned of John Tunstall’s murder and were told to turn back. Ealy refused. He had come to raise a church and a school where none officially stood.
Near town, Murphy and Dolan’s men ringed the wagon and searched it for guns. Ealy told them plainly that he had come only to teach, preach, and tend the sick. No weapons were found. The party rolled on to the Dolan store. There Ealy asked the way to Mr. McSween and Mr. Shields, respected Presbyterians. When the men outside learned his purpose, they mocked him.
“We don’t take much stock in your school and church talk, but if you’re sawbones you’ll get plenty to do, hell’s breaking loose in Lincoln and some folks are surely going to get hurt. Do you know anything about gunshot wounds doc?”
Laughter followed him down the street toward the McSween house, a hundred and fifty yards east…his wife and children almost certainly terrified behind him.
McSween briefed him on the war.
“What you are drifting into, is really a struggle of the people to throw off the corruption of robbery and persecution,” McSween bark
“I am ready to serve the community no matter how great the risk is.”
He was on a mission from God. He had walked, unknowing, into the devil’s playground.
About a week after they arrived, Ealy and Mary gathered nearly twenty people for their first Sunday service. He did not speak Spanish, but local volunteers translated. In the months that followed he planted both school and church; only a dedicated building remained to finish the work.
He judged Alexander McSween a man of noble aim, trying to lift Hispanic neighbors from the Dolan faction’s economic grip. Yet he watched with clear eyes as McSween turned Tunstall’s cowboys into gunfighters. Their revenge was savage. Sheriff William Brady and others of Dolan’s posse died. McSween withdrew into the mountains.
Ealy stayed. He kept the Sabbath school running under threat of violence. Working in McSween’s garden, an old man warned him the Dolan gang meant him harm. Then Jack Long, drunk, seized his arm.
“I hung a preacher once in Arizona, but I won’t hang you…”
The meaning was plain. Some of Dolan’s men talked of hanging Ealy from a tree. He wrote his superiors:
“Did I tell you about Jack Long? He Said he helped hang a preacher in Arizona? Do you know anything about a minister being hanged in Arizona?”
Dolan’s men are prosecuting Mcsween, partly because he is a Presbyterian. They are a dirty set of Irish cutthroats and you know what their religion is?… They drink whiskey and Gamble and nothing is too bad for them.
”On April 1, 1878, Ealy saw Brady ambushed.
“I saw some men with guns pass our house, the corral door swung open and after gunfire the Sheriff fell mortally wounded, I didn’t not hear him groaning but the women in our house said they did. George Hindman, Brady’s Deputy, fell and he called for water and someone helped him up and as he was being helped towards Stockton’s Saloon he received another wound and fell dead.”
He climbed to the rooftop to look and was shot at, then went back inside. That same day Colonel George Purington of Fort Stanton summoned him.
“I believe you all know about this murder of the sheriff?!”
Ealy pointed to his daughter.
“Sir I am as innocent of the sheriff’s death as that little child. I am sure it is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you! I am not pleased at all that you have accused me of knowing anything about this murder.”
For months the factions tore at each other. Ealy preached funerals for the dead of both sides. For a moment it seemed he might stand between them. Sunday services still drew men from McSween’s and Dolan’s gangs; they sang the hymns. Still he was marked as McSween’s man.
One Monday morning in July he was readying school when a child ran in: both gangs had entered Lincoln. He canceled class and barricaded his family inside the Tunstall store. For days they heard shooting, yelling, screaming. By Wednesday they were desperate for water. Susan Gates and Ealy’s wife went out, betting that women would not be shot.
On July 19, 1878, Sheriff Peppin’s posse, aided by Colonel Dudley’s troops, burned the McSween house. Alexander McSween and four others died. Near the end of the 5 day battle, soldiers from Fort Stanton led the Ealys to safety. Almost no friends remained in Lincoln. After a few days at Fort Stanton, where Ealy and Colonel Dudley could not get along…the family left.
Before taking a new post among the Zuni in western New Mexico, Ealy wrote to his superiors. In May 1879, Taylor and Mary were summoned back to Fort Stanton to testify at the court-martial of Colonel Nathan Dudley for his part in the 5 day battle. Mary was too ill to go. Ealy remembered the stand:
“Dudley sat in front of me when I was to testify, he had his thumbs in his vest armholes, looking me directly in the eyes. Dudley’s lawyer asked me, ‘don’t you know the Bible speaks of ingratitude sharper than a serpent’s fang?’”
Ealy answered,
“The Bible does not say that you’re quoting from a book you are not familiar with?”
The lawyer objected. In the end Dudley was dismissed and cleared of all charges.
After the testimony a warning note reached Ealy that men were going to kill him. He was told to take a roundabout road home to Zuni. He did, by way of Roswell.
For four years Dr. Ealy and his family lived among the Zuni at Zuni Pueblo and served them as doctor and teacher.
In the late 1880s he returned to Schellsburg, the town of his schooling, college, and medical training. Working with his father and other physicians, sometime in 1890 he created a new formula for baby powder and sold it as talc powder under the T.F. Ealy Baby Powder Company. The formula was later sold or capitalized through patents. A medical school acquaintance of about the same age, Frederick Kilmer, was also working on remedies. Kilmer became director of scientific laboratories at Johnson & Johnson from May 1889 to 1934; history names him the inventor of baby powder.
Back in Pennsylvania, Ealy helped found the Christian Endeavor Union and became its first president.
He died February 19, 1916, in Schellsburg, of throat complications that may have begun or worsened after his return. He was buried in Schellsburg Cemetery. The University of Arizona holds his family papers, documents, and diaries, including passages on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War.
Note: Talc deposits lie in New Mexico and on the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. It was later discovered that baby powder can cause cancer. Dr. Ealy died in 1916 from throat “problems.”