George W. Stewart, M. D. While the professional position and attainments of Doctor Stewart are such as to command respect throughout Kiowa County, where he has lived since the opening of the reservation to settlement, and over the state at large, it is a matter of knowledge to comparatively few how vigorously he contended with difficulties and embarrassments in his early youth to gain what his ambition craved. Doctor Stewart is a Southerner by birth and training, and his early youth was spent in the section of the South ravaged by the Civil war. It was only after reaching his majority that he was able to take up his long deferred plans for gaining an education, and was a farmer, a merchant and teacher before beginning the practice of medicine.

His great-grandfather Charles Stewart emigrated from Scotland to Virginia in the closing years of the eighteenth century. From Virginia he moved into Georgia, and thence into Alabama, followed his vocation as a farmer in those various localities, and died in Pickens County, Alabama, but near the city of Columbus, Mississippi. Doctor Stewart’s grandfather was John Stewart, who was born in Georgia in 1795, and died in Milam County, Texas, in 1860. He was likewise a farmer, lived in the States of Alabama and Mississippi, and a short time before the war moved to Texas, where he died.

Doctor Stewart was born in Itawamba County, Mississippi, September 10, 1856. His father was Wiley S. Stewart, who was born in Pickens County, Alabama, in 1831, and died at Fulton, Mississippi, in 1872. He was a farmer and stock raiser all his active career, and from Pickens County removed to Itawamba County, Mississippi, and was living there when the war came on. He saw four years of service in the Thirty-second Mississippi Regiment of Infantry, was shot through the arm in the Battle of Chickamauga, and returned home from the war a physical wreck, and never fully regained his health. He married Mary A. Cobb, who was born in North Carolina in 1833 and is now living at the venerable age of eighty-two with her son Doctor Stewart at Hobart. There were eight children in the family, a brief record of them being as follows: John A., a farmer at Hobart, Oklahoma; Dr. George W.; Wiley M., a farmer near Hobart; Sidney Jackson, a farmer at Denton, Texas; Mary, who is now living at Gorman, Texas, the widow of T. L. Gates, who was a merchant in Gorman, Texas, and died there; W. P., who is with the Warden Printing Company at Oklahoma City; R. L., a farmer at Sentinel, Oklahoma; and L. F., who is an educator and is vice president of the Panhandle Agricultural School at Goodwell, Oklahoma.

As one of the older members of this family and with his youth passed in the time and under the conditions briefly suggested above, Doctor Stewart had a youth of many cares and responsibilities besides those immediately concerned with his individual advancement. His common school education was derived from the schools of Itawamba County, Mississippi, and in 1878, at the age of twenty-two, he graduated from Fulton Academy in that county. For a few years he combined merchandising with farming and was a teacher for six years. In 1888, with such savings as he had managed to accumulate in addition to supporting his own home and family, he entered the Memphis Hospital Medical College at Memphis, Tennessee, and was graduated M. D. in 1890. Doctor Stewart is still a close student of his profession, and in 1908 took a post-graduate course in the Chicago Post Graduate School.

His practice began at Fulton, Mississippi, in 1890, and in 1893 he removed to Cause in Milam County, Texas, practiced there until 1896, and practiced in Hill County, Texas, until 1901. In that year he came to Hobart as one of the pioneer physicians to locate in Kiowa County, and has since enjoyed a large general medical and surgical practice. Since Oklahoma entered statehood he has been county superintendent of health of Kiowa County, and is also prominent in medical organizations, having served two years as president of the Kiowa County Medical Society and is now its vice president, and is a member of the State Medical Society and the American Medical Association. His offices are in the Jones Building on Fourth Street.

Doctor Stewart is a democrat and served three terms on the Hobart City Council. He is a member and president of the board of trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is a charter member of Hobart Lodge No. 198, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, being a past master by service; and is a charter member of Hobart Chapter No. 37, Royal Arch Masons, and is also affiliated with Hobart Camp No. 84, Woodmen of the World.

Doctor Stewart in 1883, when a young man still struggling to fit himself for his chosen work back in Mississippi, was married at Fulton to Miss Margaret E. Nabors. She died in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1907. Oscar Stewart, the oldest child of this marriage, is now one of the prominent men of Oklahoma, and is superintendent of the State Institute for the Blind at Muskogee. He is a graduate of the School for the Blind at Austin, Texas, afterwards attended Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, is an ordained minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and in 1914 was urged to take the nomination for Congress from his district, but refused that honor, though his abilities insure him many substantial distinctions in public affairs. He is an active democrat. Oscar Stewart married Miss Jane Robertson of Virginia, and their two children are Wilhelm, born August 12, 1907; and Virginia Elizabeth, born in October, 1908, these being the only grandchildren of Doctor Stewart. Otho, the second child of Doctor Stewart, is a graduate of the Southwestern University at Georgetown, Texas, and is now pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, at Coweta, Oklahoma; Oland, the youngest child, is now a student in the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Doctor Stewart was married at Hobart in 1908 to his present wife, Miss Ida Wilkie, who is of German descent and came to Oklahoma from Wisconsin.