From the collection of the Harvard Historical Society.

Our readers respond: 

Dr. Royal lived and worked out of the house at 1 Elm St., the brick house where John Cunney and Jared Wollaston live now.

—David Woodsum, Tahanto Trail

Dr. Royal’s sign was in front of the house on the corner of Elm Street and Still River Road. He gave me a vaccination so I could start school in 1943. In the 1950s the house was the home of the Donaldsons.

—Beverly Davis Cobb, Blanchard Road

When we first moved to town in 1984, Stanley Turner showed me where Dr. Royal kept his medicine. It was under the stairs in the southeast corner room of what was then the Beebe-Center house, the brick house on the Common. Mr. Turner told me that the first-floor hallway was the waiting room and there was a narrow bench in it.

—C. Ron Ostberg, Warren Ave.

And the answer is …

The home and office of Doctor Royal in the late 1800s at 1 Elm St. (Courtesy photo)

As these three readers correctly guessed, the sign “Dr. H.B. Royal” hung on the brick house at 1 Elm St. Doctor Herbert Benjamin Royal practiced medicine out of that house for 60 years; he was Harvard’s beloved physician and the classic “country doctor.”

According to Kathleen Cushman in the Harvard Post, Jan. 2, 1976, Doctor Royal “rode with his horse and buggy all over the hills of Harvard and the surrounding towns—delivering babies, caring for the sick, responding to emergencies ... He had the gruff, quiet dignity of the intelligent Yankee. He never hurried. His charge was two dollars a visit.”

“Doc” Royal arrived in Harvard fresh out of Maine Medical School at Bowdoin College in 1888. He set up practice out of his boarding house on Old Littleton Road (now the home of Robert and Marianne Hubert), and one of his first patients was the retired town doctor, Jacob Eaton. During this time the young doctor grew to be friends with Eaton’s daughter Alma, who was a schoolteacher at the Center School. When Jacob Eaton died a year later, Doctor Royal married Alma and the two set up house in the Eaton homestead at 1 Elm St. In addition to tending to his practice, Doctor Royal tended the extensive grounds of his home, grew apples, raised animals, and had a huge vegetable garden every summer. Today Jared Wollaston and John Cunney are stewards of this property.