Whipple House Museum - Ashland, NH
Posted by: 
silverquill
N 43° 41.661 W 071° 37.918
19T E 287900 N 4841292
Now operated as The Whipple House Museum, this home was built in 1837 by Obadiah Smith and was occupied by five generations of the same family for 133 years.
Waymark Code: WM1EBQ
Location: New Hampshire, United States
Date Posted: 04/19/2007
Views: 27
The Whipple House was built in 1837 by Obadiah Smith and was occupied by five generations of the same family for 133 years. In 1970, George Hoyt Whipple, of the fourth generation of the family, gave his boyhood home to the Town of Ashland to be preserved and used as an historical museum.
Obadiah Smith was a merchant and entrepreneur. His oldest daughter, Frances Moody Smith, married George Hoyt and lived in the other side of the two-family house. Their daughter, Frances Anna Hoyt, married Dr. Ashley Cooper Whipple and had two children, George H. and Ashley C.. Ashley, named for her late father, married Charles Gavin Platt. The three Platt daughters, Frances, Elizabeth, and Dorothy, were the fifth generation to live in the house.
The twelve-room house was originally built as a two-family dwelling. The central hallway divides the house into two portions, each consisting of a large kitchen, a dining room, a parlor and three upstairs bedrooms. Many features of the house show a quality of construction unusual for its time. Museum exhibits include period rooms and local history displays.
The museum is free of charge, although donations are welcome.
For more information on the Whipple House Museum, call (603) 968-7716.
Ashland Historical Society
DR. GEORGE H. WHIPPLE
George Hoyt Whipple was born in this house in 1878 and spent his boyhood here. He attended Phillips Andover Academy, Yale, and Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he received the M.D. degree in 1905. With the exception of one year as a pathologist for the Panama Canal project, Dr. Whipple then worked in the Department of Pathology at Johns Hopkins, becoming a professor in 1909. In 1914, he became director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research and Professor of Research Medicine at the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1921, Dr. Whipple was invited to Rochester, N.Y. to design, staff, and organize a new medical school at the University of Rochester. He served as its dean until 1953. Dr. Whipple had a distinguished career as a pathologist, medical educator and researcher. He shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1934 with Drs. George F. Minot and William P. Murphy for discoveries leading to a cure for pernicious anemia. Dr. Whipple died in Rochester at the age of 97 in 1976.