My name is Eva H. Wilcox, I was sent to the Sanitorium

My Dearest Readers,

My name is Eva H. Wilcox. While I was born in New Brunswick, Canada in July of 1887. I’m not a full-blooded Canadian. My father (James Robert Wilcox) was born in Maine in 1848 and my dearest mother (Lucinda T. Plant) was born in New Brunswick in the year 1866. I was born in the small parish of Grand Manan with four other siblings (Phillip, Arnold, Victoria + Hatzell) to a Free Will Baptist family.

Even though I was married to my dear husband Raymond M. Huntley in Portland, Maine on the 13th of June 1907, it wasn’t until the birth of my second child, my daughter Myrtle, that I lived in the United States as an American again. Before I died, I had three other children, one other daughter named Phyllis and two sons, Milton and James –but we called him Jimmy.

Sometime around the birth of my second daughter, Phyllis, I contracted tuberculosis of the lungs. Even with this illness, I still bore two more children with my husband Raymond.

It seems around my 27th birthday that I contracted tuberculosis — I am still not sure or how this happened, but it began to affect my life and landed me at the local doctors who sent me to Central Maine Sanitorium, there was no cure for me.

I don’t know how long I spent at the sanitorium, but at the time the Central Maine Sanitorium in Fairfield, Maine was where they sent the sickest of all of us.  When I died, I was only 32 years old and left my four children in the care of my husband.

And that, my dearest readers is all I can tell you about myself at this time.

Yours truly,

Eva H. Huntley (née Wilcox)

P.S. I’ve included an artists rendition of what the Sanitorium would have looked like only about five years before I died there.

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