Andrew Craigie Jnr

Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society

Andrew Craigie Jnr, (1754-1819) son of Orcadian Andrew Craigie who was shipwrecked in America, became America’s first Apothecary General during the American Revolution. He attended the Latin School in Boston with William Scollay, William Eustis and Christopher Gore. His friend Samuel Gore was a member of the Boston Tea Party.

He was appointed commissary of medical stores by the Massachusetts Committee of Safety in April 1775, with instructions to impress beds, bedding and other necessaries, giving receipts to the owners. He was at the Battle of Bunker Hill in July, possibly tending the wounded.

He worked in the Procurement department, acquiring medicines from private shipments and anywhere else he could find them. He was then sent to Carlisle to build the Army Hospital Department’s principal store. Craigie prepared all the medicines and completed the assembling of hospital and regimental medicine chests. He suggested that an issuing store should be established near the army, where chests could be replenished and this was done in 1778. He became Washington’s Apothecary General in 1777 and was in charge of the procurement, storage, manufacture and distribution of drugs for the Army. He established a large scale manufacturing plant in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Courtesy National Park Service,
Longfellow National Historic Site

After the war he married Betsy Shaw and bought the large house in Cambridge, Massachusetts that Washington had used as his head-quarters for eight months. He and his young wife entertained lavishly; their guests included Talleyrand and Queen Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent.The above photo was taken in the 1860s.

Craigie became a large-scale property speculator and led a group of financiers who built a bridge across the Charles River to Boston in 1810 and laid out a grid of streets that became East Cambridge. However, by the time of his death he had lost his fortune and his impoverished widow took in lodgers, including the poet Henry Longfellow. When Longfellow married, his father-in-law bought the house for the young couple and it is now preserved as the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House.

Since 1959, the Andrew Craigie Award has been presented annually, for a career of outstanding accomplishment in the advancement of professional pharmacy within the Federal government.