John Grammar Brodnax, physician and Confederate surgeon, was born in Dinwiddie County, Va. He practiced medicine in Petersburg, Va., and Rockingham County, N.C., where he also farmed. During the Civil War, Brodnax supervised several Confederate hospitals. The collection is chiefly family correspondence, 1827-1920, involving members of the Brodnax, Ruffin, Jones, Roulhac, Adams, Glenn, and related families of North Carolina and Virginia, and a few financial and legal items. Early items include several 1845 letters to Mary Brodnax, student at St. Mary's School in Raleigh, N.C., and one from North Carolina Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin in Raleigh to Robert Brodnax in Pittsylvania County, Va., about Mary's progress in school; and an 1849 letter to John Grammar Brodnax from relatives in Alabama about buying land there. Also included are letters, beginning in 1849, to John Grammar Brodnax from his uncle Thomas Withers, physician of Petersburg, Va., chiefly about family matters. Civil War era materials include letters and other items relating to Brodnax's army career, which he spent, for the most part, around Petersburg, Va. Included is a printed circular from the Confederate Surgeon General about administering smallpox vaccine. There are also several letters from Thomas Ruffin during this period that are chiefly about family affairs. Among the few items after 1865 is a 1908 letter from Nannie Roulhac about whether or not certain individuals had ever belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.
