Dr. Binkley and his family wandered far from their roots in rural Dickson County, Tennessee. The doctor was born on June 15, 1829, in Davidson County, Tennessee, to Henry John Binkley and Nancy Emiline Gleaves, who moved to nearby Dickson County while he was still a child. After studying medicine with Dr. L. M. N. Cook in Wilson County, he attended the Pennsylvania College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where he received his degree in 1853. The following year he returned to Tennessee to practice medicine in Stewart and Gibson Counties and in Nashville.

On May 23, 1854, he married Rachel Eliza Ryan, daughter of Dr. Thomas Jefferson Ryan and Martha Byrns of Robertson County. Their children were Mary Isabel [1856- 1929, m. George Edwin Upchurch], Henry Ryan Binkley [1856-1924], John Thomas Binkley, Jr., [1859-1934, m. 1. Alice Leffingwell, 2. Florence Vail, 3. Martha Wurzbach], and Nannie Byrns Binkley [1867-1963, m. George Henry Connor].

John Thomas Binkley, Jr., was born on October 10, 1859 in Cave-in-the-Rock, Hardin County, Illinois. He taught school for two years before beginning his study of medicine at St. Louis Medical College and at Ohio Medical College, where he received his degree in 1883. After practicing in Cave-in-the Rock and in Pawnee Rock, Barton County, Kansas, he moved to Tacoma, Washington, where he served as City Health Commissioner and as chief surgeon at Fannie Haddock Hospital. In 1891, after specialized training in New York, he moved to Chicago, where he was prominent both medically and socially. In 1893 he founded the now-defunct Chicago Hospital. In 1896 he invented a tricycle ambulance, which was used to transport patients to his hospital, attaining speeds of seventeen miles an hour. A member of the Chicago Gynecological Society, he served as secretary of the organization for a number of years and also served on the board of the Josephine School of Nursing and the Chicago Charity Hospital. In the last decades of his life he travelled extensively. By 1930 he was living in San Diego, California, where he died on March 8, 1934.

Madeleine Binkley, the daughter of John T. Binkley, Jr., and his first wife Alice Eaton Leffingwell, was born on March 1, 1892, in Illinois. Her mother died when she was three years old, and she was educated at St. Mary’s Episcopal Boarding School, in Knoxville, Illinois, founded by her grandfather Charles Wesley Leffingwell, and in Switzerland. She married Joseph Marion Goss, with whom she had three children. In 1937 their son Alan Drake Goss was killed in an automobile accident in Paris, and Madeleine was injured. Her rehabilitation led to an interest in yoga, not widely practiced in the United States at the time; and in 1959 she and yoga instructor Clara Spring published Yoga for Today. However, she is best known for her biographies of musicians, which include:

Beethoven, Master Musician [1936]
Deep-Flowing Brook: the Story of Johann Sebastian Bach [1938]
Bolero: the Life of Maurice Ravel [The first English biography of Ravel, dedicated “To the memory of my son Alan who, in a sense, inspired this work” - 1940]
Unfinished symphony. The story of. Franz Schubert [1941]
Brahms, the Master [with Robert Haven Schauffler - 1943]
Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers [1952]

John Thomas Binkley, III, the son of Dr. John Thomas Binkley, Jr., and his third wife Martha Wurzbach, was born on May 1, 1914, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the California Institute of Technology and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. He studied at Oxford University and at the Sorbonne before receiving a law degree from Harvard Law School. After serving in the office of New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey, he became an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During the last years of his life he was a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Gray, Binkley, and Pfaelzer. In August 1960 he travelled with his wife and children to Italy, after attending a legal conference in Salzburg, Germany. He died of spinal meningitis on August 13 in Florence and is buried there.

Dr. Binkley, Sr., was not the only child of Henry John Binkley to leave rural Tennessee. The son of Henry’s second wife, Nancy Mills, he was born nearly thirty years after his older half-brother, on May 1, 1859, in Charlotte, Dickson County, Tennessee. After teaching school in Dickson County, he studied medicine; and by 1900 was practicing in Newbern, Dyer County, Tennessee. About 1905 he moved his wife, the former Sarah Ola Campbell, and their two surviving sons, William Campbell Binkley and Robert Wilson Binkley, to Orange County, California. He died in California on June 7, 1937.

William Campbell Binkley was the oldest son of Dr. Frederick Mills Binkley and Sarah Ola Campbell. Born in Newbern, Dyer County, Tennessee, on April 30, 1889, he received his B. A., M. A., and Ph.D. from the University of California. After completing his education he taught political science at the University of Texas and history at Colorado College, Vanderbilt University, the University of Houston, and Tulane University. At Colorado College he served as head of the History Department, and at Vanderbilt he served as chairman of the Social Services Division. A member of the American Historical Association and a founder of the Southern Historical Association, he served as president of that organization and of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. He served as editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and The Journal of Southern History.

Dr. Binkley specialized in Texas history, and his published works include

The Expansionist Movement in Texas, 1836-1850 [1925]
Official Correspondence of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836 [1935]
The Texas Revolution [1952]

William Campbell Binkley died on August 19, 1970, in New Orleans. He is memorialized by the William Campbell Binkley Graduate Education Fund at Vanderbilt University and the Binkley-Stephenson Award given annually for the best article published in the Journal of American History. Dr. Binkley’s papers are housed at the University of Texas, where he spent many summers in teaching, research, and writing.

In his article “William Campbell Binkley, 1889-1970: Historian, Editor, Teacher” in the August 1971 issue of the Journal of Southern History, Henry L. Swint wrote, “The essence of the individual is intangible and, like all intangibles, beyond accurate analysis. . .The chronology of the life of William Campbell Binkley does not reveal the man.”

Robert Wilson Binkley, youngest son of Dr. Frederick Mills Binkley, was on January 23, 1893, in Newbern, Dyer County, Tennessee, and moved with his family to Orange County, California, as a boy. He received his undergraduate degree with honors from the University of California in 1915 and graduated first in his class from the University of California Medical School in 1918. He completed his surgical residency at the University of California Hospital, where he was chief resident in 1921-1922. In 1922 he moved to Selma, California, where he practiced for many years and served as chief of staff of the Selma District Hospital. In May 1964 he travelled to Austria and died on May 29 during an emergency operation in Frankfurt, Germany.

Robert Wilson Binkley, Jr., was the older son of Robert Wilson Binkley, Sr., and Grace Marie Hamlin. He was born on December 23, 1921, in San Francisco, California. In 1942 he received his undergraduate degree with honors from the University of California, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received his master’s degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from Columbia University. He taught at both California and Columbia, where he was twice voted the university’s most outstanding faculty member. He also served as assistant dean of students at Columbia and as a staff writer for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He died in Selma, California, on September 19, 1962, after a long illness.

Dr. Frederick Mills Binkley II was the younger son of Robert Wilson Binkley, Sr., and Grace Marie Hamlin. He was born on March 29, 1924, in Fresno County, California. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and in 1945 his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco. A pioneer vascular surgeon, he was a co-founder at UCSF of the world’s first specialized vascular surgery department. After retiring from UCSF, he served as chief surgical adviser for Blue Shield of California and as chairman of the Cardiovascular Committee for the California Medical Association. He also continued his life-long passion for golf. In memory of his father he founded the Binkley Visiting Professorship at UCSF and the Binkley Surgical Research Foundation. Dr. Binkley died on May 28, 2006, in Orinda, California.

By no means were all of Henry John Binkley’s descendants who moved west doctors. One who was not was Robert Winfield Binkley, another son of Henry John and his second wife Nancy Mills. Robert was born in October 1848 in Dickson County, Tennessee, and married Mary Paralee Campbell in 1874 in Dyer County, Tennessee. The family moved to Orange County, California, probably about the same time that his younger brother Frederick Mills Binkley did. Although Robert had been a furniture dealer in Tennessee, in California he became the manager of a grocery store and by 1920 owned his own store in Santa Ana. [His nephew William Campbell Binkley sometimes worked at his uncle’s store during his student days.] However, a decade later his wife had died, he was working for wages as a grocery clerk, and he was living in the household of his son-in-law Elias Beasley, husband of his daughter Anna. He died in 1933