1905 History of Crawford County Kansas

Dr. J. H. Woodbury is known not only at his home town of Cherokee and its vicinity, but also over a large section of the middle west, his reputation being based upon his extensive manufacture of herbal remedies, which are used in thousands of households and are considered necessities of the medicine chest just as much as are camphor and quinine. By those who use them the Woodbury remedies are considered to possess wonderful recreative power, and the fact that they are manufactured from noted medicinal herbs without admixture of any mineral substances or deleterious elements of any kind indicate that the fame of his medicines is based on substantial and enduring ground. Among his most popular and effective remedies are Woodbury's Golden Oil and the Rheumatic King, and these and others have a wide and constant sale in different parts of the county. Dr. Woodbury has an excellent and well equipped laboratory in Cherokee, and his remedies are manufactured with the greatest care and in accordance with the most scientific principles of modern chemistry.

Dr. Woodbury is an old-timer in Crawford county, having located here in 1879, a quarter of a century ago. He was born in Union City, Randolph county, Indiana, April 25, 1844, of an old family of that state. His paternal grandfather, William Woodbury, who had been a soldier in the war of 1812, settled in Indiana in 1831, among the pioneers. Alonzo Woodbury, the father of Dr. Woodbury, is now living near Arcadia, Kansas, at the very advanced age of eighty-five years, and his wife, Elizabeth E. (Earheart) Woodbury, a native of the Mohawk valley in New York, is also still living, a venerable old lady of eighty years. The father has followed farming as his active occupation, has been a Republican in politics, and he and his wife are Methodists. They reared eight children, five daughters and three sons.

Dr. Woodbury was reared in Indiana, where he was taught above all else the value of honest industry, but he was also well privileged educationally. He studied in the medical colleges at Dayton and Union City, Ohio, but began active practice before he received his sheepskin of graduation. From Indiana he went to Page county, Iowa; was at Rockport in Atchison county, Missouri, and then at Polo, Caldwell county, in the same state, where he preached the gospel. He came out to Kansas in 1865, being a resident near Lawrence for awhile, and since 1879 he has been an esteemed and useful citizen of Crawford county. For several years he was also a faithful and zealous minister of the Christian church, of which he is a consistent member.

He was married in Page county, Iowa, in 1864, to Miss Nancy Grove, a native of Ohio, and they have become the parents of the following children: Etta, George, Charles, Frank, Eldora, Della, Bessie, Fred, Ella and Ernest. Politically the Doctor is a Republican, and has aways[sic] borne his share in affairs of the community and is a conscientious and broad-minded man in every particular.