He was admitted to the practice of medicine at New London, Connecticut. He left his native city of Poughkeepsie, New York on a trip south for his health. After marrying in 1807 in New Berne, North Carolina ®134, he served as a surgeon with the New York forces ®135 in the War of 1812. ®134 They had four daughters and two sons. ®134 They lived probably first at New Bern, North Carolina ®135, beginning in 1808 ®102, at times in Newton, Hillsborough, Salisbury, Fayetteville and in 1823 ®135 to Raleigh, North Carolina. He was one of the commissioners for building the capitol in Raleigh which was completed in 1840. On the 1840 US Census he and his family lived in Raleigh. They finally settled during January, 1845 in Petersburg, Virginia. ®134 In 1846, John Beckwith, M.D. and his son T. Stanly Beckwith, M.D., (also a newcomer to Petersburg and a doctor) engaged in a suicidal dispute with the Petersburg Medical Faculty, a group of regular physicians who, like physicians elsewhere, had recently organized to define and combat quackery. High on the Medical Faculty's new list of unethical practices was the promotion of "secret nostrums". The Beckwiths meantime had made a considerable investment in the production and sale of Beckwith's Antidyspeptic Pills, and they saw the Medical Faculty's code of ethics as a mere pretext for driving out competitors. The Beckwiths stood their ground and took the dreary consequences. Consultations were refused, and patients grew fainthearted. Creditors closed in, and the Beckwith's furniture, evidently a gift from Edmund Ruffin, was sacrificed to pay them. ®2074 Dr. Beckwith soon tired of fighting, and he retired from the practice of medicine, leaving his large family with very little income. Into the breach stepped the Beckwith women. Kate's mother tried taking in boarders, but had to give it up "as her old fashion-open-house-entertaining was not money-making." Kate, for her part, tried to get some cash out of her accomplishments. She opened a school for young ladies in which she taught piano, voice, guitar, and drawing, and she was apparently a popular teacher. But she, too, failed to make enough to solve the family's continual financial problems. ®2074 On the 1 June 1850 census of Petersburg John Beckwith, MD, 64 and born in Connecticut, lived with his wife Margaret, 62 and born in Connecticut, and children all born in North Carolina, Cornelia, 27, Catherine, 24, Nancy, 20, John 19, and Edwin Gary, 6. ®2069 On the 22 Jun 1860 census John is 75, and living in Petersburg, Virginia with Margaret, age 73, daughter Cornelia, age 29, Nancy K, age 2?, Ann G. Nash?, age 11, and _____ V. Nash?, age 9. ®2075 Mrs. Beckwith died in Petersburg in 1864, and in 1865 Dr. Beckwith and his daughters Cornelia and Nancy went to live with his daughter Katherine Spalding, at Riverdale (now The Bronx), NY. ®134 ®2074 “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me. Write blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth.” ®103 He died at age 85. ®104

Check The Bronx for probate, etc.