Dr. William Hopkins Anderson was born February 14, 1835, in Florence, Pennsylvania. Anderson
graduated from the Eclectic College of Medicine and Surgery at Cincinnati in 1855. He immediately
opened a practice in a rural section of Iowa, about seventy miles north of Des Moines. Four years later,
he moved to Utah, settling in an area 25-30 miles south of what would soon become Franklin, Idaho. He
married in September 1861. As a country doctor, Anderson spent nearly forty years treating patients in
Utah's Cache and Malad Counties, as well as across the Idaho border in Oneida County. In 1897, he
moved to Soda Springs, Idaho. Dr. Anderson bought an existing mercantile establishment and expanded
it to include what was reported to be the first drug store in the town.