John and Jessie Hurlbut, with their daughter Hazel, circa 1894

Hurlbut spent his youth in Portage, Wisconsin, before enrolling at Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago, where he studied homeopathy, graduating on February 24, 1887. He maintained a practice in Duluth, Minnesota, for a few years before moving to California, where he worked at the Hoopa Valley Indian Agency and lived in Arcadia. Hurlbut earned his second medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in San Francisco in 1903. He relocated to Lewiston in October 1902. “I have heard on every hand,” he told a local reporter, “only expressions of confidence in the future of Lewiston. Every person seems to be firm in the belief that Lewiston is destined to become a big city, and I must confess after an inspection of the situation that my own ideas are emphatically inclined that way.” Dr. Hurlbut set up his Lewiston practice in the newly-completed Thiessen Building at 4th and Main Streets, what was once called “Old Corner.” The building was razed in 1965. He was a founding physician of St. Joseph's Hospital in Lewiston in 1902, now St. Joseph Regional Medical Center.