When Dr. Norman H. Nickerson arrived in Greenville on August 1, 1920, he was stepping into a legacy that already ran deep. His uncle, Dr. Hiram Hunt, had been the Moosehead Lake area’s first physician, and it was in Hunt’s modest two-room office that young Nickerson set up his practice. He would work out of that same building for decades — its shelves lined with old medicine bottles, its scales an antique even then — serving patients across the Moosehead region through some of the hardest years in American history.

Nickerson was a Bowdoin man, graduating from the college in 1916 and from Bowdoin Medical School in 1919. He served as a Naval hospital corpsman in World War I and later as an Army lieutenant colonel in World War II, seeing service in South America, Italy, Sicily, Africa, and Iran before returning to Greenville and the patients who needed him.

In the North Woods of his era, medicine was not a nine-to-five profession. Nickerson made his rounds by horse and buggy, train, car, and railroad handcar. He performed emergency surgery on a kitchen table when no other option existed. For many years, he and Dr. Fred Pritham — the subject of last summer’s popular History by the Lake presentation — were the only two doctors in Greenville. The two men were close friends and colleagues for more than 50 years.

Beyond his practice, Nickerson served as school physician for three towns, as medical officer for the Civilian Conservation Corps camps at Greenville Junction and Kokadjo during the 1930s, as a state medical examiner, and as president of the Maine Medical Association in 1953 and 1954. In 1976, the town of Greenville honored him for more than 50 years of service. In 1982, he received a Jefferson Award Certificate of Recognition for extraordinary public service.

He kept at it well into old age — still carrying his black doctor’s bag at 90, still stopping in at the hospital to chat with nurses and doctors. “I like to see the nurses,” he once said. “Greenville has the best doctors and nurses around.”

Join presenter Matt Muzzy and members of the Nickerson family as we look back on the life of a man who devoted himself entirely to the health and wellbeing of this community — and left it better for his presence.

Thursday, August 13, 2026 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Center for Moosehead History