Dr. William Edward Hoge

Dr. Hoge was born on May 26, 1822, on the Hayfield/Belle Hampton property in what is now Pulaski County, Virginia, and died near Point Pleasant in Bland County on February 3, 1885. He belonged to one of the New River Valley’s longstanding families, the son of General James Hoge and Eleanor Haven Howe, and married Jane L. Meek on August 20, 1844. By about 1855, he had begun his medical practice in Newbern and soon relocated to the Point Pleasant, or “Slide,” community in Bland County, where he became a respected country physician, landowner, Presbyterian elder, school benefactor, and Masonic leader. The surviving record portrays him less as an urban institutional doctor and more as a learned, classically minded rural practitioner whose influence rested on service, property, kinship, and local trust.

When yellow fever broke out in Memphis, TN, he, as a doctor, was able to pass through the quarantine blockade to smuggle his wife’s orphaned niece and nephew, Sophia and Eugene Edmondson, safely to Virginia. He and his wife took responsibility for them and raised them as their own.

Dr. William Hoge died suddenly on February 3, 1885, from sudden paralysis at age 63.