FARISH, Dr. Henry Greggs: 1781 - 1856
Henry Greggs Farish, son of Greggs J. Farish and Margaret Collins Farish, was born on June 18, 1781 in Brooklyn, New York while the British flag was still flying during the tumultuous years of the American Revolution. His father was, at the time, a commissary in the British Army. The records say “The British flag was flying over the house and a sentry was guarding the door.”(1)
After the war ended, Henry’s family moved to Shelburne, Nova Scotia. Henry entered the British Navy as assistant surgeon at a young age and served aboard the Asia and later aboard the Cleopatra. After retiring from the navy, he practiced medicine for a short time in England before returning to Nova Scotia about 1806. Here he joined the Yarmouth practice of Dr. Joseph Norman Bond who had been a surgeon with the Loyalist forces during the Revolutionary War, served under Cornwallis and was present at the surrender of Yorktown, before settling with his family in Canada. Until the arrival of Henry Farish, Dr. Bond had been the only physician in Yarmouth for the previous twenty years.
Henry Greggs Farish married Sarah Bond, daughter of Joseph Bond, on August 3, 1806. The Bond family had a strong tradition of practicing medicine. Another family member, Sir Thomas Bond, had, in collaboration with Benjamin Franklin, co-founded the first hospital in Philadelphia in the 1750s. During the Revolutionary War, Dr. Thomas Bond and his son helped organize the medical department of the continental army and the Philadelphia hospital served their forces; however, Loyalist Stephen Jarvis also received treatment there during a period when Loyalist forces occupied the city. The Bond/ Farish line continued the tradition of entering the medical profession and a family historian noted that by 1930 there had been twenty-one physicians on the Bond/Farish family tree of descendants.(2)
Dr. Henry Greggs Farish died on April 1, 1856 at the age of seventy-four. He was eulogized in glowing terms in a history of the County of Yarmouth written in 1875:
In addition to his duties as a medical practitioner, in which capacity he was very highly esteemed, he filled for many years, with singular ability, integrity and impartiality, many public offices. He was Naval Officer, Collector of Excises, Registrar of Deeds, and an able Magistrate. He was also Land Commissioner, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and for fifty years Postmaster ... The ruling principle of his life seems to have been a strong sense of duty, from which he would not swerve, however painful the consequences might be to himself.(3)
Notable among the descendants of Henry Greggs Farish and Sarah Bond Farish is daughter Ellen, who married the Honourable Stanley Brown, a member of the Executive Council (appointed in 1843) and Receiver General of Nova Scotia from 1857-1860.
A slight slip of the clay slip inlay material on this tile gave the F of Farish the appearance of a P. With the assistance of the Nova Scotia Medical Association we were able to determine it reads Dr. Farish, not Dr. Parish.
1. G.W.T. Farish, M.D., A Medical Biography of the Bond-Farish Family (The Canadian Medical Association Journal XXIII, 1930), pp. 696-698.
2. Farish, p. 697.
3. Rev. J.R.Campbell, A History of the County of Yarmouth (St. John: J.A. McMillan, 1876), via www.googlebooks.com.