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Henry Louis Smith was an eminent scientist who in 1896 developed the first practical medical use for X-rays. Smith later devised a system for infiltrating Axis lines with Allied propaganda that helped hasten the end of World War I, for which Woodrow Wilson praised him fulsomely. Smith was the president of two colleges, one of them Washington and Lee University (1912-29).
And Henry Louis Smith was an uncle. He had a special attachment to a niece and nephew who grew up in Lexington in the 1930s, Jean Dupuy Taylor and Henry Marshall Taylor, who sometimes struggled in their school work. Dr. Smith, by then retired but always an academic at heart, invented a system of financial incentives to encourage the Taylor children’s good grades.
The complex system was revealed in a fascinating exchange of letters between Dr. Smith and the two young people. Now that correspondence has been edited, annotated and published in “Rockbridge Epilogues,” the online journal of local history, by his grand-niece, Suzanne Barksdale Rice, whose mother was the elder half of the young beneficiaries.
The article, “Affectionately your Uncle,” is available free at www.HistoricRockbridge.org.
“Rockbridge Epilogues” are published with the informal endorsement of the Rockbridge Historical Society and Historic Lexington Foundation (HLF). “Affectionately your Uncle” is the 38th article in the 6-year-old series.
The letters were written principally by Dr. Smith, who exhorts his young relatives on the importance of education in general, and Jean Taylor, who shares news of the family as well as her own progress toward college. (She went to Farmville State Teachers College, now Longwood University.) For example, on the prospect of a weekend in Washington, she reported that “I am so excited that it’s hard to sit still and write.”
Suzanne Rice, compiler of the letters, was born in Lexington and is a former president of HLF. A graduate of William & Mary, she had a long career as an arts administrator. Her father was Flournoy H. Barksdale, an official at Virginia Military Institute for four decades. She found the letters three years ago — literally in a trunk.
