HISTORICAL COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER 12-12-15

The Eye Doctors

Eye care has certainly come a long way in the last hundred years. Originally, a case with a myriad of corrective lenses was all you needed to provide better vision for the masses. Most of these were considered “opticians”, which meant that they only provided corrective lenses, not any medical eye care. The first one listed in Salisbury was in 1899 at the Harper & Taylor jewelry store. C. E. Harper was listed as a graduate optician. The jewelry store had been established in 1886 and was located in the Peninsula Hotel on the corner of Main and St. Peter streets. The jewelry store, along with the hotel, burned down in 1926. The new building on the site was the Salisbury National Bank.

By 1907, another long time provider of eye care had emerged on the scene. He was Dr. Harold N. Fitch and was still doing business in 1950. He advertised that he ground his own lenses. Harper & Taylor had ceased doing business sometime in the teens, so Salisbury still had only two choices to get better vision.

The first reference to Dr. A.B. Boulden was in the City Directory of 1921. He practiced in Salisbury for over 40 years.

Another entity in the eye glass field was the eye glass supplier. This was Berks Optical and they made glasses for the Optometrists. They didn’t prescribe any corrective lenses. You had to go through your Optometrist. This was quite an inconvenience as they wouldn’t just fix a minor problem without a 2 or 3 day delay. Most people cannot go that long without their glasses.

This is where a new business sprang up – Accurate Optical. They were fast and would do all the work on site, thus eliminating the long wait people had become used to. Their first place of business was on the south side ofMarket Street downtown.

Others opened eye care businesses during the 1950’s. Many of us remember Dr. Clifton G. White, Dr. M.W. Reese or Dr. W. A. Lynch.

There are many venues that offer better sight nowadays and not many are aware that there is a significant difference between just getting corrective lenses and getting good eye care. Diseases such as glaucoma and cataracts cannot be diagnosed by some of the places you can get new glasses.

Yes, things have changed a lot since Ben Franklin invented the bi-focal type of eye glasses. The era of the traveling “eye specialist” had pretty much come to an end by the end of the 19th century. New methods encouraging the establishing of a permanent business had sprung up and added to the base business of a city or town. We now have many ways to see better, even if we don’t always like what we see.