The Other Nanzetta
Off and on between 1906 and into the 1920s, Danville, Virginia was home to a Patent Medicine Man who styled himself as “The Great Nanzetta”. In the decades that followed his death, memory regarding the once well-known “healer” faded and became confused with another eccentric Danville character whose identity was equally as mysterious. She, too, was known as Nanzetta, but that was not her name. How she got it is unclear, but the most likely answer is that the nickname was simply given her because she bore so many similar characteristics to the Dr. John H. Nanzetta whose “greatness” was so loudly advertised decades before.
“About three days a week,” Danny Ricketts was quoted as saying in a September 1992 “Friday Flashback” by Adrian O’Connor of the Danville Register and Bee, “as the darkness of night was closing in, Nanzetta would materialize on Aspen Street, near Dean and Washington streets in North Danville. She would turn onto Washington Steet, and fade into the darkness.”
Of the characteristics she shared with “Dr.” Nanzetta was her long, straight black hair, and her ambiguous gender: Was she man or woman? And her equally ambiguous ethnicity. “Was she white or black?” O’Connor asked. Was she Indian (Native American) as her hair seemed to suggest. “Or a gypsy, which would make her even more mysterious?” Mr. O’Connor’s account stated that some believed her to be a witch, and, to support that claim, she was often seen “tramping through the woods” gathering flowers and herbs for her spells and remedies.
A local woman, Idella Lynch, whom O’Connor interviewed in that same article of September 1992, claimed all the children of that North Main neighborhood were afraid of her. “All the kids would run inside when she was coming and then peek out of the windows at her as she passed by.”
This Nanzetta, unlike the “doctor” who had generally been described as small, even diminutive, was a large woman, “about six feet tall with huge feet on which she put only men’s shoes. Facially her features were rough and one of her dark, piercing eyes was cocked permanently to the right.” As to her dress, she wore only black, or at least very dark colors, and carried a large satchel with her. Her skirts fell to her shoes, and she often kept her face covered with a black bonnet pulled low over her eyes. According to Margaret Barksdale in a follow-up article written by O’Connor just a few weeks later, “She had a big lower lip, a big nose, and a masculine look about her.”
Like the “doctor”, this Nanzetta was a healer, and perhaps it was that more than anything else that won her the name. Other witnesses who spoke with O’Connor recalled times when she had come to their homes to apply salves and herbal remedies, some of them made by the Nanzetta Medicine Company, and all of which she carried in her large satchel.
Margaret Barksdale remembered the female Nanzetta coming and attending to wounds her grandfather had which wouldn’t heal under any other treatment and from which he only found relief by way of the medicine woman’s care. More than that, Margaret remembered her name: Elllen Nunn.
With this information and the help of a friend at a funeral home, O’Connor found Ellen’s obituary, a task much easier for us now with digital archives.
Ellen’s death notice is as notable for what it doesn’t tell us as for what it does. According to the article published in the Danville Bee on the 5th of February 1940, Ellen had lived in “Danville for thirty years or more” and was a “well-known character” here. She was 65 at the time of her death on the 2nd of February 1940. She died at the City Home (where the Mayflower Restaurant is presently located) “where she had been bedridden since September 15th of the year previous.” … “People throughout this section knew Ellen Nunn because of her frequent journeyings into the countryside,” the article read, “carrying her little satchel containing patent medicines.”
The article does not tell us of her family, apart from mentioning a brother who lived “somewhere in West Virginia” and that she was a native of Henry County. It does reference an interesting episode in her life, mentioned also by O’Connor, regarding her efforts to obtain a job as a detective in Washington D.C.
With her date of death in hand, I went in search of her death certificate. It, too, is notable for what it does not tell us. Where the form asks for the date of birth, it is simply written, “Don’t Know.” The same answer is given, written diagonally and underlined in the section where information regarding the parents’ names and birthplaces is requested. For place of birth, it reads, “Franklin County”, which is a deviation from the Patrick and Henry county places of origin provided by others who may or may not have known better. Her anonymity is strange considering how many Nunns populated the area in the decades contemporary with her life here in Danville. Her death certificate also states that her age was “about 64” which implies the informant—a staffer from the City Home—was not certain. Where the form asks for the occupation of the deceased, however, it states that she was a seller of patent medicines—again, a point in common with the “doctor” Nanzetta who had lived in Danville and who had died a decade before Ms. Nunn. Also of note, this never-married and, by all accounts, terrifying and somewhat disfigured woman died of syphilis (of which, some of her physical deformities may have been symptomativc). All of this, at least to this writer and student of history suggests a life filled with difficulty and trauma.
I kept digging.
In February of 1924, Ellen went to Washington, D.C. to look for a job as a detective. Employed prior to this time in the local cotton mill, she had recently completed a correspondence course of a month’s duration, and for her effort had received a certificate that was meant to prove her qualifications as a detective. At first she endeavored to obtain a situation with the local police force, but they dismissed her. She applied for permission to carry a pistol and was denied.
While her applications for work in the city won derision, her efforts in the nation’s capitol cost her a good deal more. Upon showing her diploma to the “Washington authorities”, the document was taken from her, possibly on suspicion that it was supplied her as a fraud. They never gave her an explanation, and they never returned it. As if that wasn’t enough, they sent her to Gallinger Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, and there she spent a month under observation and where she received treatments of alternating hot and cold therapies. “Miss Nunn said that she never did quite understand what they treated her for but that she was very weak when she emerged.” Upon being released from the hospital, she found her resources depleted to the degree that she had to get work at the Salvation Army in order to earn enough to buy her ticket home.
At what point in her life she began selling patent and herbal remedies, it’s not really clear, but her return to Danville in 1924 coincided with Dr. Nanzetta’s residence here. Whatever the case it seems she was fairly itinerant in the years leading up to her death.
In the October 9th article by O’Connor, he mentions talking to an Ed Jones who had lived on a farm in Gatewood, North Carolina. Many times, Mr. Jones recalls his father letting her sleep in their barn and that this went on through the 30s. On one occasion, however, when she did not rise and depart at her usual time, Mr. Jones went into the barn and found her, “so weak … that she could barely stand. Ed’s father called a doctor and the Caswell County sheriff, and she was summarily taken to Danville,” probably to the City Home, where she passed away.
In an effort to trace Ellen’s early life, I went back to the genealogical websites where I had searched several times before with little luck. On this occasion, I found something. Using FamilySearch, I found a file. Ruth Ellen Nunn was born on the 7th of October 1872 in Franklin, Virginia to Thomas H. Nunn and Louvica Ann Davis Nunn. Ellen’s mother died in 1913 of stomach cancer. In 1920, her father died of “supposed paralysis” with contributing “supposed Rheumatism” with an added note that read “No physician had visited him in quite awhile”. I looked for a death notice for context but found none.
Ellen’s brother, John Sampson Nunn, did indeed live in West Virginia. He died in 1972 of heart disease.
Ellen may have come to Danville because of an uncle who lived here. John Wesley Nunn lived on Main Street with his wife Olive. The couple had no children.
Another uncle lived in Roanoke and worked for the railroad, and his family’s story—and the tragedy thereof—deserves some space in this post. Joseph Henry Nunn died suddenly in 1910 while walking down the street, a victim of pneumonia, though he had been ill only a brief time. He left behind his wife, Lucy “Jane” and their eleven children. With the money from her husband’s life insurance, Jane purchased a home on 10th Street in Roanoke for herself and her children. Tragedy struck again, however, when, in the early morning hours of April 27, 1911, a fire broke out in the home, killing eight of the children. John Edward was announced by the papers to be a hopeless case and his death was all but expected. He survived, however, and lived another 36 years. The papers made no mention of his history or the cause of his death at 56. His death certificate indicates heart disease made worse by alcoholism—an understandable result of childhood trauma. Lelia, the eldest, born in 1882, jumped from a second story window to escape the fire, along with a guest of the house who had spent the night. Lelia suffered a broken foot and other injuries, including burns. A son, Dorsey, was married and living away from home at the time.
Dorsey, a railway conductor, survived the fire but died six years later in 1917 when the train he was driving derailed and crushed him. He survived for four days with traumatic injuries to his thigh, foot, and groin, but passed away from infection caused by debris from the wreck that was trapped in his wounds.
For myself, all of this research was conducted simply to separate Ellen’s history from Dr. Nanzetta’s. And like, the great “doctor”, so much of what we have previously known is conjecture and guesswork and a labor of separating documented fact from hearsay and outright fiction, which is all the more difficult when the first-person source is unreliable—as is the case with the great “doctor”. Ellen was eccentric at least. Perhaps she was actually as mad as the “authorities” in Washington feared (or wanted to believe). Ellen Nunn, the “other Nanzetta” has been a mystery that has stuck like a thorn in the claw of the Nanzetta folklore. Now that it is untangled, we can begin our work at untying the rest of the knot that is the intentionally obfuscated and mysterious history of Dr. John H. Nanzetta, “the man who knows”, the “King of Dentists” and a “real Indian doctor”. It’s a mystery that, as challenging as it is and will undoubtedly continue to be, it is one that will not let me go, and so, starting in January, and over the course of the next year (2026), We will be publishing regular articles about him and about the progress of my research, research that I intend will culminate in a book of biographical (and perhaps at times creative) non-fiction. On that, we’ll keep you posted.
Sometimes the detective work is as interesting as the story itself, after all. We hope you’ll join us on the adventure.
Sources:
Census and other Vital documents found at Familysearch.org
Images and vital information, including biographical sketches found at FindaGrave.com
Death notices and other information found in the Danville Register, Danville Bee and other newspaper archives at Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank.com
River City: Stories of Danville, Adrian O’Connor. 1993. Danville Register and Bee, Danville, VA
