Erasmus Darwin McMaster

Erasmus Darwin McMaster was born in 1866 — the twin of Robert Thompson McMaster — to Gilbert Clement McMaster and Margaret Thompson McMaster. He died young of a weakened heart, and the year of his death is not recorded in this archive. Robert carried the same condition and lived with it until age 55.

The one image of him in the family’s keeping is the 1866 cabinet card — the B. L. H. Dabbs photograph of Margaret Thompson McMaster holding the twin infants in their first months. He is one of the two babies in his mother’s arms.

The name itself is striking. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) was an English physician, natural philosopher, poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin; his evolutionary speculations in Zoonomia (1794) anticipated his grandson’s Origin of Species by sixty-five years. To name a son in 1866 Pennsylvania Erasmus Darwin is to reach for a 19th-century intellectual lineage on purpose — whatever the McMasters who named him had in mind. The deck doesn’t say.

He left no descendants, no further photographs, and no surviving words. He is in the record because his twin lived and married and had Peggy, and because Maggie Eesley’s catalogue preserved his name beside Robert’s.

Source: Maggie Eesley, Four Generations of the Eesley Family (PowerPoint archive); deck slide on Margaret Thompson McMaster (MTM001 en).