Living Treasure: Dr. John Wilson

Dr. John Wilson  Photo: Urban News

By Marnie Walsh

Dr. John Wilson is the son of missionaries, and he has dedicated his life to enriching the quality of life for individuals and communities, locally and internationally, as a physician, missionary, soldier, educator, humanitarian, and volunteer.

His mother, Bess Knox Wilson, and father, Dr. Robert Manton Wilson, met and married in Korea, and John was born there May 29, 1916. His father became a pioneer in the treatment of leprosy and established Korea’s largest leprosy hospital.

John graduated high school in Pyengyang Foreign School in Korea,
where he became a friend of Ruth Bell, also a child of Presbyterian
missionaries (and later the wife of evangelist Billy Graham). He
returned to NC to attend Davidson College and Jefferson Medical School
in Philadelphia. During the summer of 1940, while working at Montreat,
he met his future wife, Nancy Dupuy, whom he married on July 20, 1948.

After
World War II, General Douglas MacArthur, overseeing the occupation of
Japan (1945-1951), invited Dr. Robert Wilson to take charge of all the
leprosy hospitals in Korea, serving 10,000 to 12,000 or more patients.
The elder Wilson suggested that John, who was commissioned as a First
Lieutenant in the Army, join him, so John returned to Korean for two
more years. He left the military service as a captain in 1947, returned
to Richmond to complete his medical residency, and then began private
practice in Greensboro, NC.

As a practicing pediatrician, Dr. John
Wilson worked at the Central Carolina Convalescent (Polio) Hospital and
Moses Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro. He returned to Kwangju,
Korea as Chief of Pediatrics at the Presbyterian Medical Center
(1968-71), the taught at the UVa Medical School, before returning to
practice at the Daniel Boone Clinic in Whitesburg, KY and privately in
Black Mountain.

He also served with the NC Department of Health
from 1975-1982; he Buncombe County Department of Health from 1975-1982;
as a lecturer for the nurse practitioner school at MAHEC, and on on
Governor Terry Sanford’s Commission for Special Education in North
Carolina.

In the 1980s, Dr. Wilson cultivated an idea for a
community garden on his property located on Lake Tomahawk in Black
Mountain, which grew to a large garden on city-owned property. He has
worked with students from Warren Wilson College, The Learning Community
School, and Black Mountain schools, as well as many volunteers, and in
2011 the Town of Black Mountain renamed the garden in his honor.

Today
the garden’s membership has grown to more than two hundred, and the
garden, now including a greenway trail, perennial and annual
agriculture, and a native plant trail, is a permanent program of the
Black Mountain Parks and Recreation Department.