At Appomattox Court House in June of 1876, Dr. Charlotte (Lottie) Cornelia Isbell was born to Thomas E. Isbell and Frances “Fannie” Diuguid Isbell. Lottie was the maternal granddaughter of village blacksmith Charles Diuguid who was one of only 171 free blacks in the county in 1860. Lottie’s paternal grandfather was Lewis Daniel Isbell- an Appomattox lawyer, Commonwealth’s attorney and representative at Virginia’s Secession Convention in 1861. ​Dr. Isbell was the first of eleven children born in her family and, sadly, one of only six who survived infancy. Lottie’s family, along with other Isbell and Diuguid family members, moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1879. Lottie completed a teacher training course in 1896, leaving the Baptist church her family had helped found in Columbus. She joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church that year and enrolled in the nurses’ training school at the Battle Creek Sanitarium led by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. In 1902 after earning her medical degree from the American Medical Missionary College, Lottie Isbell became the first African American Seventh-day Adventist doctor. Lottie went on to care for patients in Tennessee and Alabama and became an Alabama state licensed physician in 1904. ​A biographer of Lottie Isbell described the 26 year old Black woman taking her medical board examination in 1904: “At the turn of the century in the deep South, a radiant, confident, brown-skinned young lady of 28 years enters a room filled with all white males. A crushing silence descended. Without acknowledging their stares, Dr. Lottie Isbell, a practicing physician for two years, takes her seat and begins to write her exam. Once the men overcome their shock of seeing a black woman physician, they make every effort to let her know she is [not] welcome. She is treated as an alien from outer space. No one dares sit beside her or utter a word to her." "The next morning the Proctor announces that Dr. Lottie Isbell scored a perfect paper. Suddenly, the doctors rushed to her desk and each one tries to sit as close to the brilliant young physician as possible. The doctors openly copied her answers word for [word]. The year was 1904. Dr. Lottie Isbell had scored another triumph. She was now a licensed physician for the state of Alabama.” ​Lottie Isbell’s interest in medicine was said to be inspired by her grandmother Sarah Diuguid- a formerly enslaved woman of Appomattox Court House, VA who served her community as a midwife and healer. Another inspiration in her pursuit of her medical career was her experience as a young black woman growing up in the South. Dr. Blake said “If there is any logical explanation required to throw light in the direction my life is taken, maybe it was the desire to save black young people from similar scenes, similar traumatic experiences.” ​In 1907 Dr. Blake married pastor and later doctor David Emanuel Blake and the couple served as medical doctors and missionaries in Alabama, Tennessee, Jamaica, British West Indies, Ohio, Panama, Haiti and West Virginia until Dr. Blake’s death in 1917. In 1920 Dr. Blake once again began her fulltime medical practice in Charlestown, WV before moving to Columbus, Ohio in and then on to Pittsburgh, PA where she practiced medicine from 1935 to 1957. While in Pittsburgh, Dr. Blake discovered a cure for the “smokey city” pneumonia that plagued industrial cities of the time. Dr. Charlotte Isbell Blake lived to be 100 before passing away in Alabama in 1976. She had been licensed as a medical doctor in several states and countries in her lifetime.