William Octavius Eversfield was born on November 4, 1840, in College Park, Maryland, to John and Ann Wailes Eversfield. His father a veteran of the War of 1812 who owned at least 27 slaves on his “Smith’s Folly” plantation. The year William was born, his older brother Charles began studying medicine at the University of Virginia, and William ultimately followed the same path. He received his early education at the Edge Hill School in Princeton, New Jersey, and graduated from St. John’s College in 1858. In 1859, he enrolled at UVA, where he studied chemistry, medicine, anatomy, and surgery. After only a year, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his medical degree in March 1861. He continued taking classes there until 1863, when he became a resident physician at the Blockley Almshouse. 

Eversfield joined the Union army on August 25, 1863, serving as an acting assistant surgeon at Mower General Hospital in Philadelphia and then accompanying the 1st US Cavalry Regiment. On November 29, 1864, the army assigned him to Camp Nye in the Nevada Territory. By June 1865, they had transferred him to Drum Barracks, near Los Angeles, California. He was discharged on October 25, 1865.

For the next two years, Eversfield worked as a surgeon for the Panama Railroad, the Central American railway line that linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. During an outbreak of yellow fever, he spent months treating patients before contracting the disease himself. He survived the epidemic and briefly returned to Maryland to recuperate. Before long, however, he signed on as a surgeon for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which transported the nation’s mail between Panama and California. 

Around 1873, he married Lillie Talbott, the daughter of a Georgetown merchant. They had four children over the next thirteen years: Eleanor, born 1874; Donald, born 1876; Octavius, born 1885; and Lillian, born 1886. In 1878, they returned to Eversfield’s family estate in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where he established his medical practice. He served as president of the county’s local medical association, and for the last twenty-five years of his life he helped oversee the medical department at the Maryland Agricultural College. He died on January 20, 1908, in College Park, Maryland, from acute gastritis, and was buried at Saint John’s Episcopal Church.

Documents:

Obituary of William O. Eversfield