Memory Lane: Area's first midwife arrived in Palm Beach with one of its founding families

The experience for women giving birth in Palm Beach in the 1880s was a lot different than it is today.

For one thing, forget the option of modern-day methods of pain relief.

Hospitals? They were a long way off.

After all, the area was still an undeveloped swamp-pocked jungle where early settlers said they crawled on their hands and knees to find a place to build a home.

Mosquitoes were so ravenous and prevalent that pioneers sometimes wrapped their arms and legs in newspaper under their clothes.

The area was lucky to recruit its first doctor by 1881.

So if you were a pregnant woman then, knowledgeable and caring health care before, during and after childbirth would be a godsend.

Millie Gildersleeve, educated as a midwife and nurse after gaining her freedom from enslavement in Georgia, provided that and more.

She served the area for decades — becoming a community leader — starting in the 1880s, when “she was the only person who delivered babies,” Gildersleeve’s great-great-great grandson, Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Bradley Harper told the Daily News in an interview last week.

“Through that,” he said, “she developed relationships across racial lines at a time when the survival of the pioneer community depended on people like her. Her story in medicine and healing and in the many other ways she helped build community is a reminder of how connected we all are. It’s a story about how we all ultimately rely on one another.”

Born circa 1858, Mildred Chapman Gildersleeve was one of the first Black pioneers in Palm Beach.

Palm Beach, though not officially incorporated until 1911, was one of the budding settlements around a 20-mile-long lake that later became part of the Intracoastal Waterway.

Based on oral histories and documentation, it is believed Gildersleeve arrived here in the late 1870s, when she became close to one of the most prominent Palm Beach pioneer families: the Dimicks, whose patriarch, Elisha, would later become the island’s first mayor.

Prior to coming to Palm Beach, the Dimicks, originally from Illinois, spent months in Jacksonville. That’s where Elisha and his wife Ella gave birth to their first child — and where Millie was educated as a nurse and midwife, Harper said.

She traveled to Palm Beach with the Dimicks — either when the Dimicks first came in 1876 or later on a return trip after they stocked up on supplies for their Palm Beach home, which in 1880 became the island’s first hotel.

“She became very close to the Dimick family,” Harper said.

Case in point: When Millie later wed M.J. “Jacob” Gildersleeve, they’re said to have been married on the Dimick’s Palm Beach lawn and the couple later purchased property from Elisha in what is today Riviera Beach (another lake settlement) where the Gildersleeves built a home, dock and farm before buying property in West Palm Beach.

It was from the Gildersleeves’ home that she grabbed her medical bag and bolted out the door when a woman living on the lake went into labor. The area’s first physician, Dr. Richard Potter, would pick her up in his boat at her dock.

Potter arrived in the area in 1881.

He’d come with his younger brother George, whose asthma reportedly improved after the two brothers from Cincinnati first settled in what’s now North Miami. They later realized the Palm Beach area might hold more promise.

As Richard Potter concentrated on building his medical practice, George Potter, a talented artist, became a successful entrepreneur and businessman.

Within the lake community, both Potters always lent a helping hand to anyone in need, as descendant David Willson, a Palm Beach Daily News columnist and cartoonist, has noted.

In Richard’s case, that in part meant giving people medical help whether they could pay for his services or not —everyone from white and Black patients to Seminoles, who’d grown to trust him.

Gildersleeve shared Doc Potter’s philosophy.

“He did so much charity work the public knew nothing about,” she recalled years later. “One family he helped, the husband was a bookkeeper, but couldn’t get any work of that kind. They had four small children … Dr. Potter sent them a box of groceries every week, he gave them medicines and he gave them a purse.”

For her part, Gildersleeve gave them clothes, she said. “I always gave the same attention to the poor as I gave to the rich, even when I knew they couldn’t pay. They are human beings…”

As the area blossomed in the mid-1890s after Standard Oil partner and developer Henry Flagler extended his railroad to Palm Beach and built two resort hotels here (including one now gone and the other The Breakers). Gildersleeve also worked with other doctors, including the community’s second: Henry Clinton Hood.

She also worked closely with others such as Dr. Leon Ashley Peek, who was instrumental in the 1914 founding of a five-bed “Emergency Hospital” in today’s downtown West Palm Beach area. The hospital would soon become overcrowded and plans to develop a new one merged with what became Good Samaritan Hospital, which debuted in 1920 with 35 beds at its present Flagler Drive location.

Throughout her career as a midwife, “I always told my patients to be natural, to do anything they had to do around the house, to take proper exercise. It’s no use for any woman to keep still during pregnancy,” Gildersleeve said.

“I had a case of a wealthy girl whose parents had pampered her. When she became pregnant, she was afraid for her parents to learn of her condition. When they did, they would hardly let her move. They wouldn’t let her go out of the house. She was scared to death, afraid to do anything. Her husband brought her to me. I told her to do anything she wanted, to take walks and do work in the house. She took my advice, dismissed her cook and did her own work and acted natural … The baby came so peacefully, it was all over before she knew it.”

Early on, Gildersleeve and her husband, Jacob, were community leaders.

They were among the founders of the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, which was established in 1893 in Palm Beach around today’s Sunset and Sunrise avenues in a settlement then known as the Styx, where lived the hundreds of workers who helped construct and staff Flagler’s hotels.

The church was reestablished in downtown West Palm Beach in 1894 and opened the first area school for Black children. Since 1925, Tabernacle Baptist has been located at Eighth Street and Division Avenue.

Before cemeteries were integrated in West Palm Beach, the Gildersleeves were among the founders of Evergreen Cemetery, a project that began in 1913.

The final resting place of, among others, influential Black citizens who contributed to the development of the area, Evergreen first operated with an association formed in 1916 led by Jacob Gildersleeve as president.

Meanwhile, the Gildersleeves owned properties they rented out to travelers and new residents “at a time when, due to segregation, many people could hardly stay wherever they wanted,” Harper said. “To this day, we know people for whom Jake and Millie provide lodging.”

Jacob died in 1931. Four years later, Millie, recently retired, was living on 21st Street in West Palm Beach in a home she owned that, according to an oral-history interview she gave in 1935, included a piano, a radio, tapestries, a kitchen with modern equipment and a yard filled with palm and fruit trees. She also owned a home on Sapodilla Avenue that she rented.

She died in 1950. In 2019, Millie Gildersleeve was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame for, among other things, the significant role she played in women’s reproductive health and childbirth during the pioneer era.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Area's first midwife arrived in Palm Beach with pioneer family