Harriet B. Jones

Who was Harriet B. Jones?

Dr. Harriet B. Jones was the first woman to be licensed as a physician in West Virginia in 1885 and the first woman to be elected to its House of Delegates in 1924.

Harriet B. Jones was born in Edensburg, Pennsylvania. In 1862, when she was just 6 years old, her parents John P. Jones and Hanna Rodgers Jones moved the family to Cranberry Summit, now Terra Alta, West Virginia. Her public-spirited father, a general merchandiser, was active in the Presbyterian church and Republican politics, serving three terms in the state legislature.

Harriet Jones attended Wheeling Female College in West Virginia and graduated with honors from Woman's Medical College of Baltimore, Maryland in 1884. Dr. Jones decided to pursue post-graduate training in gynecology and abdominal surgery in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago before returning to Wheeling, West Virginia in 1886 to set up a private practice. She became the first woman doctor licensed in the state. Two years later, the board of West Virginia Hospital for the Insane in Weston, later renamed Weston State Hospital, elected her assistant superintendent. Building on her background in hospital administration, Dr. Jones returned to Wheeling in 1892 to establish a women's hospital that thrived for the next twenty years.