Joseph H. Romig

Joseph Herman Romig (September 3, 1872 – 1951) was a frontier physician and Moravian Church missionary, who served as Mayor of Anchorage, Alaska from 1937 until 1938.

Joseph H. Romig was born September 3, 1872 in Edwards County, Illinois to Joseph and Margaret Ricksecker Romig, both the descendants of Moravian immigrants who had settled in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. He grew up with nine brothers and sisters on the Chippewa Mission Farm near Independence, Kansas. The Moravian Church sponsored his medical training at the Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia in exchange for a pledge to serve for seven years as a doctor at a mission. At school, he met Ella Mae Ervin of Kingston, Pennsylvania, who was studying nursing.

In 1896, Joseph and Ella were married, and the couple moved to Bethel, Alaska to join Joseph's older sister Edith Margaret and her husband John Henry Kilbuck as missionaries to the Yup'ik people. Joseph and Ella had four children: Robert Herman (born 1897), Margaret Maryetta (born 1898), Helen Elizabeth (born 1901), and Howard Glenmore (born 1911). For a time, Romig was one of the only physicians in Alaska. He became known as the "dog team doctor" for traveling by dog sled throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the course of his work.

In 1903, with his term of missionary service complete, Romig relocated the family to San Francisco, California. He was there for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and ran an emergency hospital in the aftermath. In 1906, he moved back to Alaska to take a job as a company physician in Nushagak. He also worked for a time as a United States Commissioner before moving to Seward to open a small hospital.

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