Sometime around 1920, Crotched Mountain Foundation founder Harry Gregg met Dr. Ezra Jones, the son of a Connecticut tavern keeper who rose from a modest background and studied at the University of Tennessee and at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland.
Dr. Jones fought in World War I, where he witnessed firsthand the casualties and consequences of battle. The unprecedented number of disabilities that arose from this great conflict inspired Dr. Jones to pursue orthopedics as a medical discipline. After the war, he became the first orthopedic specialist in New Hampshire.
As demand grew for Dr. Jones’s expertise, more and more community clinics were needed throughout the state. Harry Gregg was one of the key supporters in organizing and sustaining one such clinic in Nashua.
In 1936, Harry Gregg and Ezra Jones were instrumental in founding the New Hampshire Society for Crippled Children—an outdated name, to be sure, and an artifact of its time. Eventually, the society adopted the name Crotched Mountain Foundation in the 1950s.
And the rest is history…
