RENAISSANCE MAN
Boyertown’s Thomas Rhoads was a doctor, banker, entrepreneur
Thomas Rhoads was used to hard work. Growing up on a farm in the non-mechanized days before the Civil War meant he spent many childhood hours in the cold of winter and the summer’s heat helping with the numerous chores running a successful farm required.
All things being equal, agriculture would have been his profession. A life spent in productive but anonymous toil.
However, in some important ways, Tom Rhoads was not a typical farm boy and the Rhoadses were not the typical farming family.
Born in what is now Boyertown on Sept. 26, 1837, he was the 12th of 13 children born to John and Catharine Boyer Rhoads. The Rhoads family had lived in the Boyertown area since 1750 when their ancestor, Conrad Roth (the name morphed to Rhoads in the early years of the 19th century), bought several hundred acres around Morysville, began farming, and built a grist mill.
John Rhoads, a grandson of Mathias, took over the farm and grist mill. His wife was Catharine Boyer, a daughter of Henry, who helped found Boyertown. As if running a large farm wasn’t enough to keep him busy, John also managed to operate a sawmill, a cider press, a blacksmith shop, whiskey distillery, and a general store. Obviously ambitious and successful, he was respected by the community.
John Rhoads also saw to his son’s education. In the era before public schools came to Boyertown, he sent Thomas to a private tutor and then to the Mount Pleasant Seminary, a private academy in Boyertown.
An incident from Tom’s childhood points to his determination and independent thinking. He started out his life named James, but that wasn’t to his liking. At some point he decreed that his name was now Thomas Jefferson Boyer Rhoads, simultaneously paying respect to one of America’s founding fathers and his mother’s maiden name.
Armed with an education, the 18-year-old Thomas became a school teacher, but this was temporary. When told he could make more money as a doctor, he began poring over textbooks that belonged to his brother Reuben, a medical doctor in nearby Zieglerville, and taught himself anatomy and physiology. Three years later, in the fall of 1858, he was off to Philadelphia to study at Jefferson Medical College. He graduated in the spring of 1861 with his medical degree.
He moved quickly to open a practice, hanging out his shingle in Gilbertsville on May 23. His practice quickly grew and he married Theresa Leidy, a daughter of Henry Leidy, slightly less than a year later, May 10, 1862. With Civil War heating up, he received a commission as a surgeon and joined the 162nd Pennsylvania Drafted Militia at Gloucester Point, Va., in December. He was discharged with the regiment on July 27, 1863.
Though Rhoads, along with his regiment, never saw combat, his fate illustrates the danger of simply being in an army camp. While stationed in the swampy area around the York River he became seriously ill with what one source described as “typho-malarial fever,” a nasty disease that subjected him to “rheumatic attacks” for the rest of his life, so probably he was infected with malaria.
With his brief stint in the Army behind him, the young doctor returned to Boyertown and continued with his medical practice. With his reputation burnished by his medical experience in the Army, his practice grew rapidly and by 1868 he built, according to his obituary, “a splendid home,” in Boyertown, on the northwest corner of Philadelphia Avenue and Chestnut Street.
Dr. Rhoads was not the type to voluntarily retire, so he continued his practice until forced out by illness in 1914. The doctor was in harness for 52 years with no vacation, and it took a compound fracture of his right leg to sideline him for nine weeks in 1882.
He was a doctor who responded to calls at all hours and in all sorts of weather to take care of patients in town and those in farms miles away. Because of his travel demands, he kept four horses but drove himself. It would be interesting to know how many babies he delivered, how many broken bones he set, how many people he sat with while they died, and how many miles and how many hours he spent traveling to tend to the sick.
That rigorous schedule would drain the average person’s energy, but it seems as if only kryptonite could stop Rhoads. In addition to his medical practice, his business career was equally demanding.
First were the banks. The coming of the Colebrookdale spur of the P&R Railroad after the Civil War and the operation of the Boyertown iron mines brought vigorous growth to Boyertown as witnessed by its population expanding from 690 in 1870 to 1,709 in 1900. This influx of people and businesses would bring the need for banks.
Rhoads knew this and in 1874 it was no accident that he was one of the founders and first president of the National Bank of Boyertown, but he didn’t rest on his laurels. In 1882 he established Farmer’s National Bank of which he was president until his death, and later, to accommodate it, built a threestory building at the corner of South Washington Street and Philadelphia Avenue.
Everyone called this structure the Opera House because of the theater on the second floor, but it also housed Farmer’s National Bank on the first floor. Rhoads was the bank’s president and its landlord.
It is well known that on Jan. 13, 1908, Rhoads’ Opera House was the scene of a tragic fire that quickly killed 171 people. A lawsuit charging Rhoads with negligence was filed by two men whose wives died in the fire, but the action was dismissed. Rhoads went on to erect a new building that was as fireproof as the technology of the day could make it.
In addition to his banking interests, Rhoads was president of the Boyertown Building and Loan Association and a director of the Boyertown Mutual Fire Insurance Co. He served a term as the town’s burgess, as a school board member, and he held many other positions, in addition to other business ventures such as a drugstore, a hardware store, and a shoe store.
Even a man with Rhoads’ iron constitution and energy is not immortal. By the time he reached his late 70s declining physical ability caused him to hang up his stethoscope. He and his wife continued to live in their home in Boyertown.
Two days before Christmas in 1919 he went to bed and never woke up. His grandson, Collier, a medical student at Jefferson, found him. He had died peacefully.