Doctors David and Patrick McGuire have been practicing dentistry in Sylva for decades. There are probably quite a lot of brothers across the country that are dentists, but there probably aren’t a lot whose parents both were dentists. And fewer still whose parents plus aunts and uncles were dentists. It becomes rarified air indeed when that lineage stretches back nearly 150 years through grandmother and grandfather to great grandfather.

James Zachary — Patrick and David’s great-grandfather — was a farmer, an artisan and a dentist. Patrick McGuire said his great-grandfather would receive requests for dental care through the mail, “and he would load up his horse and buggy and travel to wherever the patient was.”

Patrick noted that dentistry was much different in those days. There were no X-rays and Novocain wasn’t introduced until 1907.

“And the procedures were done outside, because the sun provided the best lighting in those days,” said Patrick.

According to David McGuire, Zachary’s second daughter, Daisy, was especially intrigued by her father’s dental work.

“She thought he was made from gold and she assisted and watched everything he did. Both of them adored the practice of dentistry,” David said.

Daisy began learning dentistry the old-fashioned way — she apprenticed under her father. The creation of the North Carolina State Dental Board didn’t deter her. She and her husband, Wayne McGuire, a carpenter from Jackson County, packed up and went to Atlanta where Daisy attended Southern Dental School (now Emory University Dental School) and in 1908 became the first woman licensed to practice dentistry in North Carolina. Her husband, Wayne, soon followed her.

Next came three daughters — Noracella, Patsy and Kitty — who all made the trip to Southern Dental School. Patsy McGuire met another McGuire, Harold (no relation), at dental school. Harold and Patsy married and joined Daisy, Wayne and Noracella in the family practice in Sylva, where they practiced for nearly 50 years, most of that time in what is now the Sylva Herald office.

Patrick and David both, at first, were reluctant to follow in their parents’ (Harold and Patsy) footsteps. Patrick first tried his hand as a chemist but soon the independent entrepreneurial spirit that he had been raised in got the better of him and he followed that well-worn path to Atlanta and, by then, the Emory University Dental School.

David said he, “vowed and declared he was not going to do that [become a dentist].”

But when he found himself a laid off construction worker with a wife and new family, he said he knew there was a better way. David attended dental school at Chapel Hill and came back to Sylva and the family practice.

“How much of it is temperament and personality and how much of it is genetics – I don’t know,” David said. “But I know it was a really good thing.”

Drs. Patrick and David, in order to better serve their community and patients, built a new facility at 45 King Street, a block off Main, in 1987. This space also contains a Peace Garden in honor of Patsy and Harold. And the brothers continue to practice family dentistry with the same spirit and attention to needs they learned from their family of dentists.

Neither Patrick nor David have any children that have taken up the profession, but don’t take that to mean the McGuire brand of dentistry will soon be gone. Daisy practiced until she was 97.