My Genealogy Hound

E. D. Rhea, M. D., a physician and surgeon of more than ordinary ability, was born in the State of Tennessee in 1835, and like the majority of the farmers’ boys of his day acquired only a common school education. At an early age, however, he evinced an eagerness for study and a desire for professional life, and acquired the taste for scientific learning, medicine having a particular fascination for him. When twenty-five years of age he went to Missouri, having previously studied medicine, and was engaged in practicing his profession there until 1862, when he enlisted as a surgeon in the Fourth Missouri Regiment, Confederate cavalry, and served in the Trans-Mississippi Department, in Marmaduke’s division, until the close of the war, after which he came to Arkansas and located in Fulton County, near Salem, remaining there in the active practice of his profession until 1876. During 1874-75 he represented Fulton County in the first Democratic legislature convened after the Reconstruction Act, and was an active member of that body during the stormy times of the Brooks-Baxter war. Since 1876 he has practiced his profession in Mississippi County, and has acquired no inferior reputation as a physician and surgeon. When the village of Blythesville was laid out he purchased property and built one of the first houses in that place, and has since been quite extensively engaged in fruit raising (in connection with his practice), in which he has had remarkable success. Since 1881 he has owned an eighty acre farm near Blythesville, thirty of which he has opened, and on which he has built a house and made other improvements. In 1879 he was married to Miss Sarah Walker, a daughter of John Walker, one of the early pioneers of the county, but in March, 1885, was called upon to mourn her untimely death. She left two children, Maggie, and Lizzie, the latter dying at the age of nine months, six months after the mother. Miss Fannie Blackwell, of Lauderdale County, Tenn., became his wife September 17, 1886. The Doctor was the youngest of a family of twelve children born to Joseph M. and Kittie (Myers) Rhea, who were born in Tennessee and Maryland, respectively. The father was a school teacher for many years, and also followed the occupation of farming. They both died in 1860, he in August and she in February.