Samuel Hollingsworth Stout

Samuel H. Stout was the son of Nashville carriage-maker and city councilman Samuel Van Dyke Stout and Catherine Tannehill Stout. Educated at Moses Stevens’s Classical and Mathematical Seminary and the University of Nashville, Stout taught school and apprenticed in medicine to his brother Josiah Stout and the latter’s partner, R. C. K. Martin, before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school in 1848. After a brief residence in Nashville, where he was active in the fledgling Tennessee Historical Society, Stout moved with his wife, Martha Moore Abernathy Stout (m. 1848) to Giles County, near Pulaski, where he owned land and slaves and practiced medicine. The couple’s seven children were born there.

When the Civil War began, he became surgeon of the Third Tennessee Infantry (May-November 1861), until he was placed in charge of the Gordon Hospital in Nashville (November 1861-February 1862). After the fall of Nashville, Stout was sent to Chattanooga, where he was soon in charge of all of the Army of Tennessee hospitals behind the lines. In this capacity, he supervised doctors and other personnel, selected hospital sites, and coordinated the needs of the medical department with military and civilian suppliers. During the summer of 1864, he supervised more than sixty constantly relocating hospitals in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

After the war, Stout lost his farm to bankruptcy and moved to Atlanta, where he practiced medicine and helped establish the public school system. In 1882 he moved to Cisco, Texas, and eventually to Dallas, where he continued his medical and educational activities, though he never again achieved financial stability. At his death, he left a collection of fifteen hundred pounds of Army of Tennessee hospital records. The collection is scattered among several southern libraries, including the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville. The largest collection is housed at the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas, Austin.