Dr. Henry Drummond Smith, son of Dr. Walter Smith and May E. Sherman of L’Orignal, played an active role in the Second World War as a Captain in the Medical Corps of the Canadian Army between 1942 and 1945. Active in Sicily and Italy, he returned to England before the D-Day invasion of 1944. 

Next, he served with the Medical Corps in France and Holland before returning to Canada at the end of the war. Ralph Ellis, another war veteran from L’Orignal, remembered how the hospital ship on which Dr. Drummond was serving, was sunk by enemy fire somewhere on the Mediterranean. Fortunately, the ship’s doctor was among those who survived the shipwreck. 

Back in Hawkesbury, at war’s end, Dr. Drummond Smith and his brother Irwin, also a doctor, practiced medicine along with their father, Dr. Walter Smith. The Smith Clinic was established on Main Street, Hawkesbury, and became an in-patient facility serving local families for many years. The Smith family also had a strong connection with L’Orignal, whose historic Duldraeggan Hall on Front Road was home to three generations of Smiths.