Wilbur Allen Drake (10 March 1874–24 January 1930), physician, was born in Auburn, Alabama, and was the son of Frederick Drake and Emma Drake (maiden name unknown), tenant farmers who moved their large family across central Alabama in search of work. Little is known about his education until the autumn of 1895, when he began attending the night school at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). Drake received his diploma in June 1897 and moved to New York City to undertake further preparatory work. While there he helped organize and was elected president of the Southern Students' League of Greater New York, a support network for African Americans who came north to study. Drake subsequently entered the Leonard Medical College, of Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, from which he received an M.D. in 1901. He spent the next year studying at the Long Island Hospital Medical College, in New York. On 19 June 1902 he married Adelaide G. Miller, a fellow Hampton student. They had two sons.

Recognizing the dire need for African American physicians in the South, Drake established his medical practice on Maryland's Eastern Shore. In 1903 the health board of Dorchester County appointed him to examine and vaccinate black students in the segregated schools. Within two years Drake and his family had returned to Virginia, where he opened a successful general practice in Norfolk. He deplored the city's lack of medical facilities for African Americans. Between 1910 and 1920 Norfolk's black population almost doubled to more than 40,000, but few hospital beds were available for black patients, who could not be attended by their own physicians in white hospitals. Those with the means to do so often traveled as far as Washington, D.C., or Baltimore, Maryland, for surgery or to receive hospital care. As a member of the Physicians Club of Norfolk and the Tidewater Medical Society, Drake participated in several unsuccessful attempts to establish a local hospital. After performing a harrowing amputation at a patient's home, he built in 1914 and furnished at his own expense a hospital next to his house.

Intended as a public institution, Drake's twelve-bed hospital opened with its first patient on 18 February 1915 and admitted all African American physicians to practice. Unable to obtain a loan to meet expenses, Drake and a group of Norfolk's black business leaders incorporated the Tidewater Colored Hospital Association in May 1915 in order to raise funds. Drake served both as secretary of the association and as manager of the hospital until March 1917, when he resigned to devote more time to his own medical practice. Other than a brief hiatus beginning in September 1917, he remained surgeon in charge at Tidewater until his death. His wife supervised the operating room and headed the department of donations and charity. A noted surgeon, who also specialized in gynecology, Drake spoke at medical meetings and published articles in the Journal of the National Medical Association. He served one term as president of the Old Dominion Medical Society from 1919 to 1920. In 1924 he was appointed a surgeon to the Virginia Railway and Power Company.

Hundreds of patients were successfully treated at Tidewater during its first decade, but Drake's plans for expansion, including maternity and children's wards and a modern laboratory with an x-ray machine, were not implemented as a result of financial difficulties. In 1924 the hospital almost closed. In his annual reports Drake voiced disappointment at the lack of support the African American community in Norfolk provided, but he remained optimistic about the hospital's future. Despite its size, he believed that it and other African American hospitals across the state were "destined to be large and influential institutions" that would offer new opportunities for future physicians. The hospital also provided training for nurses and midwives employed in rural health districts. He hoped that Tidewater would eventually be able to offer free care for indigent patients.

The stress of managing and often financing the hospital's work exacerbated Wilbur Allen Drake's health problems. He died of a heart attack at his Norfolk hospital on 24 January 1930 and was buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, in Portsmouth. After his death the hospital was called Drake Memorial Hospital until it merged two years later with the maternity ward of the Tidewater Colored Graduate Nurses Association and became the Norfolk Community Hospital, which closed in 1998.

Sources Consulted:
Full name and self-reported birth date in World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1917–1918), Record Group 163, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Drake student file with birthplace and Peabody Newspaper Clipping File (microfiche ed.), item 267, nos. 46–48, and item 268, nos. 90–91, both Hampton University, Hampton, Va.; State Corporation Commission Charter Book, 87:547–549, Record Group 112, Library of Virginia; Southern Workman and Hampton School Record 27 (1897): 239–240; Southern Workman 32 (1903): 60–61 (with marriage date); ibid. 44 (1915): 254–255; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 3 Mar., 1 Sept., 6 Oct. 1917, 12 Feb., 13 Aug. 1921, 5 May, 1, 22 Dec. 1923, 23 Aug. 1924, 2 May 1925 (portrait), 24 Jan. 1948; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 13 Dec. 1973; publications include Drake, "Crusade Against the White Plague in Norfolk, Virginia," Fourteenth Annual Report, Hampton Negro Conference (1910), 57–62, "Some Problems of Gynecological Surgery," Journal of the National Medical Association 9 (1917): 21–23, "The Gynecologist: Some of His Problems and His Obligation to the Present and the Future," ibid. 12 (Jan.–Mar. 1920): 16–19, "Address to the Virginia Association of Graduate Nurses," ibid. 13 (1921): 213–217 (quotation on 215), and column in Norfolk Journal and Guide, 26 June 1926; Death Certificate, Norfolk City (variant birthplace of Montgomery, Ala.), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 25 Jan. 1930, Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1 Feb. 1930 (variant birthplace of Montgomery, Ala.), and Southern Workman 59 (1930): 144.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Marianne E. Julienne.

How to cite this page:
Marianne E. Julienne,"Wilbur Allen Drake (1874–1930)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Drake_Wilbur_Allen, accessed [today's date]).

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