Overland Trail Museum adds Doctor Portia book to gift shop

The Overland Trail Museum has added a new item to its gift shop that reaches far beyond the shelves of a museum store. For $10, visitors can buy Doctor Portia, a history-driven book about Portia Mary McKnight Lubchenco, the Sterling physician whose life connected Logan County to medical work in Colorado, Russia and Turkestan.

The book fits naturally inside a museum built around the story of the Overland Trail, the stage route that followed the south bank of the South Platte River through northeastern Colorado. The City of Sterling says the trail ranked among the heaviest traveled roads in America from 1862 to 1868, and the museum uses that heritage to help explain how the region grew. A book about Lubchenco gives that mission a modern extension, linking local history to the wider movements of medicine, travel and service in the early 20th century.

Lubchenco, born in 1887, graduated from medical school in 1912 and went on to practice in Sterling for 50 years. History Colorado’s oral history record identifies her as the first woman doctor in Colorado, and records tied to her papers say she became one of the first female chiefs of staff of any hospital in Colorado. Her story is not just about one career. It is about how a woman from South Carolina built a life in northeastern Colorado while helping modernize hospitals and medicine across the state.

Her life also carried her through upheaval abroad. The oral history record says she and her family were detained on a ship returning to the United States because authorities suspected she was a Russian spy, and that she proved the children were hers by nursing them. Her archived papers, spanning roughly 1900 to 1982, include medical papers, writings, personal papers, photographs and travel diaries. The Denver Public Library’s materials also note Sterling real estate records, obituaries and memorials in the collection.

The Overland Trail Museum gift shop is operated by the Logan County Historical Society and already sells local and western history books along with regional merchandise. Doctor Portia fits that pattern, but it also does something more important: it keeps an overlooked local figure in circulation. At a museum known for pioneer history, a schoolhouse, church, blacksmith shop and general store, the book extends the lesson past the gallery walls and into homes, classrooms and the wider memory of Logan County.