Zeeb Gilman '63 Dies at 105
ON JUNE 5, 1946, another Dartmouth institution passed into the pages of history. Dr. Zeeb Gilman, Class of 1863, died quietly at his home in Redlands, California, at the age of 105.
Since 1938 upon the death of Edward Tuck '62, Dr. Gilman had been the College's oldest living graduate and had, only a few weeks before his death, received congratulations from Dartmouth men from all parts of the United States on the occasion of his 105 th birthday, May 13.
A native of Piermont, N. H., a Connecticut River valley town approximately thirty miles north of Hanover, Dr. Gilman was the son of Dr. Zeeb Gilman, Class of 1836, and Naomi (McNeil) Gilman, and was born May 13, 1851. He entered Dartmouth in 1859 at the age of 18. The Dartmouth College that the young graduate of Kimball Union Academy knew in 1859 and his following undergraduate years consisted of Dartmouth, Reed, Thornton and Webster Halls, grouped around the College Green, or the Common as it was then known. In addition there was the Gates house,- an early undergraduate venture in cooperative living which Dr. Gilman and his contemporaries rented and for which they hired a housekeeper to do the work and the cooking.
Near the end of his senior year, with the Confederate armies threatening Washington, Dr. Gilman and some fifty of his college mates volunteered for service with the Union Army. Assigned to the Quartermaster Corps in Washington, young Gilman at one particularly pressing period was assigned to guard duty at the White House and the War Department along with other members of the Quartermaster's.
His first assignment of this type was sentinel duty at the door of Secretary of War Stanton's office, and he had not been on guard there long when President Lincoln appeared for a conference. Flustered, the buck private presented arms with his gun backwards. Dr. Gilman was fond of recalling in his later years that President Lincoln merely smiled and passed a kind personal word with him.
On the tragic night of Lincoln's assassination, Dr. Gilman was billeted only two blocks away from Ford's Theatre and he well remembered the excitement and the shocked grief that lay over Washington at the time. At the end of hostilities, he was mustered out of the Union Army with the rating of Quartermaster Sergeant.
Following his discharge, he entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and received his M.D. from that institution with the Class of 1867. Settling in Ackley, lowa, following his graduation from Columbia, he practiced medicine and worked in a drug store. Discouraged with the working conditions of his profession at that time in lowa's rigorous winter climate, he soon moved to nearby Remsen and entered the lumber and coal business. In 1890 Dr. Gilman sold his lowa interests and moved to Redlands, California, where he again entered the business world until his retirement in 1919.
Differing from most people of advanced age, Dr. Gilman offered no personal prescription for longevity, despite the fact that he never drank or smoked. He had no strong feelings about indulging in either; he simply felt that they did no good and might do one harm.
Married May 18, 1875 at Freeport, Ill., to Miss Ella Klock, Dr. Gilman is survived by his wife and three daughters, Mrs. Edna Tyre and Miss Eunice Gilman, both of Redlands, and Mrs. Grace Shoemaker of Los Angeles. He and Mrs. Gilman celebrated their 71st wedding anniversary only a few weeks before his death at the home of their daughter, Eunice, with whom they resided for many years.
Dr. Gilman's death leaves Charles G. Johnson '71 of Pasadena, California, Dartmouth's oldest living graduate. He celebrated his 98th birthday this past July 4th.
In 1772, John Ledyard arrived at Dartmouth College as a freshman with yards of calico for stage curtains loading his ramshackle sulky, and left the College in a huff a year later when severely reproached for petitioning for the students "to spend leisure hours in stepping the minuet and learning to use the sword," and for wasting both his time and money on such fripperies.
DR. ZEEB GILMAN '63
