I came across a scrapbook belonging to Helen Joy Hinckley. She created it when she was in France and Belgium working as a Red Cross nurse with the Harvard Surgical Unit. She wrote her captions in French and the greetings written by doctors and patients are in French, too. Her scrapbook is in the collection of the Paul S. Russell, M.D., Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital. I couldn’t find out much about her life, except that it appears she spent it as a nurse, helping people. She was born in the same Maine town in which she is buried.
Born and raised in Blue Hill, Maine, Hinckley was a member of the Beta chapter of Chi Omega at Colby College. Her chapter knew her by her middle name, “Joy,” and she served as an officer. She was at Colby from 1906 to 1908. She studied nursing at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1910 until 1913 and she became a Registered Nurse.
Hinckley sailed to France in 1915 to help with the war effort and she was there for four years. A headline in a August 4, 1919 newspaper about her service read, “Won personal thanks of King George.”
In 1936, she was supervisor of the Infirmary at Pickwick Dam in Hardin County, Tennessee. The project to build the dam began in March 1935 and it opened in May 1938. In a report to the Colby Alumni, Hickley said:
Pickwick is the only wholly electrical town in the United States. It is very nice except when the current goes off. At the present moment we are having a violent thunderstorm. The river has risen so high the Dam is covered.
Hinckley spent some time as a Registered Nurse at the University of Michigan. She died in Maine in 1955 at the age of 65.
