Hubbell Pioneers - Maryland
A Pioneer and a Red Cross Worker
Josiah Hubbell & Julian Hubbell
England's first claim to the New World came about 1497, just five years after Columbus landed in the West Indies. The explorer was John Cabot who discovered land near the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Cabot's second exploration took him to the east coast of North America as he sailed south to Chesapeake Bay, and he was the first European to see the shore of Maryland -- or so it is believed.
None of the Hubbell family participated in this bit of exploration, but it paved the was for a young man of English ancestry 300 years later to beget a child who would be the first Hubbell born in state of Maryland.
Born in January 1772 in Connecticut, Josiah Hubbell remained with his parents, Silas and Elizabeth, probably on the family farm until he was in his late 20s. The year of his migration to Maryland was about 1800 or before because we know he was married there to Mary Townsend in 1801. We are assigning the Josiah Hubbell family the honor of being the first of the name to reside in the state. The couple had five children, all born there, and parents lived together until 1817 when Mary died at the age of about 30. Josiah married a second Pamela Smith in 1829 and had one more son by her.
Of the five children, two boys and three girls, Eliza married a doctor, William was lost at sea and Edward became a physician. Son Josiah (of second marriage) had a family.
Being so close to the nation's capital means that Maryland should literally teem with famous Hubbell personalities, and it does. Most these have been reported in the three editions of the History.
There is one to whom we would like to give repeat billing because of his association with a national figure and an international institution. He was not born in Maryland, but because he became famous in that state and lived there we are including Julian Bertine Hubbell, a relatively unknown man but a great one nevertheless. The following sketch is taken from the 1915 History of the Hubbell Family.
Julian Bertine Hubbell of Glen Echo, Maryland, son of Willliam Hubbell and Eliza Jane Smith, was born February 5, 1847, in Sabula, Iowa.
In 1862 he went with his mother and brother Charles Mulligan Hubbell to a farm called Hubbell Farms, near Anamosa, Iowa.
He spent a year in 1864 or 1865 in St.Louis, Missouri, with an uncle in the brokerage business. Afterward he returned to the farm, attended school and taught; later attended Cornell College (Iowa) for two years; then went into partnership with his half-sister's husband, S. H. Goodyear, in 1876; was principal of the Dansvillle, New York, Hygienic Seminary in 1876.
This partnership continued until 1880, when he became associated with Clara Barton in her effort to bring the United States into the compound treaty of the “Red Cross” for the amelioration of the sick and wounded of the armies on the battlefield and at sea. This was accomplished in 1882. While associated in this work he graduated from the University of Michigan as a Doctor of Medicine, and was associated with Clara Barton until her death in 1912. In his “Red Cross” work, Dr. Hubbell was engaged in every field of relief work except the Galveston disaster in 1900, when he was ill with fever contracted in Cuba.
His work with Clara Barton and the Red Cross covers a period of 23 years on the following fields: Michigan Forest Fires, 1881; Mississippi famine, 1885; Charleston, S.C., earthquake, 1886; Mount Vernon, Ill., cyclone, 1888; Florida Yellow Fever, 1888;; Johnstown Flood, 1889; Russian famine (in Russia), 1892; Pomeroy, Iowa, cyclone, 1892; South Carolina Islands Hurricane and Tidal Wave, 1893-1894; Armenian massacre, relief in Asia Minor, 1896; Cuban relief, 1898. He was associate U.S. Delegate to International Conference of the Red Cross, at Karsruhe, Germany, 1887, and at Vienna in 1897, and sole U.S. delegate at the International Conference of the Red Cross at Rome.