Museum Corner November 2021

Historic home houses new City Hospital

By Becky Buher

Last month we learned about the people who made Bedford’s two early hospitals possible. The first hospital utilized a small house on 14th and I Streets, the second a two-story house on East 16th.

By 1900, the public needed a larger facility, but finding an existing building that was big enough was a challenge.

The final choice was located south of the city in Brightwood Addition, named for John and Sarah Bright who had lived there in the 1880s or 1890s. Gustavus S. Houston had platted the addition and owners, W. A. Brown and George McDaniel, retained the right to timber where streets and alleys would be located. In 1908, Isom Davis owned the Brightwood house and four lots which the City Council bought for $1,800. Brown sold one of his lots to the council for $100, making the total for the house and five lots $1,900.

The City Hospital would utilize the existing nine-room three-story brick house which banker, Isaac and his wife, Juliet Rector, had built circa 1853. Isaac had been an avid gardener, cultivating roses, flowers and ornamental shrubbery, raising vegetables, growing and grafting fruit trees, and collecting sugar from about a hundred maple trees.

 Unfortunately, the Rector family suffered financial disaster in the 1860s when an employee embezzled bank funds. Rector’s son, philanthropist Edward Rector, remembered that his father bankrupted himself to make good the bank’s debt, but despite valiant efforts, the bank failed. In order to satisfy creditors, the house and acreage sold for $5,450 at public auction in 1867 to Jesse A. Mitchell, James W. Palmer and Henry Culbertson. Large pine trees adorned the house’s front yard. The yard was surrounded by a board fence, and it was said that the front yard fence was the city boundary.

Bedford Daily Mail, March 20, 1908, recorded: “…a new city hospital is filling a longfelt want, and doing much good as a place where the sick may receive skillful nursing, and the best of medical attention. The [current] hospital is being run in a successful and competent way, but [it] must depend on its income from patients for support, consequently the charitable feature is lacking. What is most needed now is a charity ward, to be supported by [the] public, where in cases of emergency, the patient being destitute of money shall be no bar to admission.”

 Children and adults gave pennies, nickels and dimes as citizens and businesses contributed to the new hospital. In Oolitic, the citizens of Quarry Town contributed liberally when women canvassed the quarries to collect for the new hospital. At Hoosier Quarry alone, contributions amounted to $45.10.

 In June 1908, John Rowe’s stone company draughtsman, Walter Williams, prepared the plans and L. Berry Emery provided the specifications for remodeling the three-story brick house.

The cost to create ten wards and a 24’ x 14’ operating room was estimated at $2,000 to $2,500.

 By December 1908, changes to the brick building were completed, the old hospital on East Sixteenth street was abandoned, and the new City Hospital was ready for use. Mrs. Lizzie Dunihue was installed as matron of the hospital and Miss Katherine Hubrick, a trained nurse from Louisville became the superintendent. The hospital was operated by a Board of Control and Drs. Freeland and Short served the new hospital.

 On Dec. 10, 1908, the Bedford Daily Democrat reported that the first patient in the new hospital was Harry Minor of French Lick. He was a Monon brakeman who had fallen from a train near Gosport about a month before. He had to crawl back to the Gosport station because no one had missed him until the train reached Greencastle.

Mrs. J. W. Finley, the pastor’s wife at the First Presbyterian Church, became the first to be operated on Dec. 12, 1908—appendicitis. The first birth recorded there was Oct. 1, 1909, when William Zachery Smith (jr.) was born.

By 1920, the City Hospital had purchased the entire 18 acres of Block “B,” which had been the playground for many picnics.

In 1924, a limestone addition was added to the brick house creating space for 28 beds. The need for more space made another addition necessary in 1931.

By the late 1930s, something larger, more modern and efficient than the hospital located in the remodeled 1853 brick house was desired. A new hospital and nurses’ home would be built using local limestone and erected behind the brick hospital building.

But that’s a story for another time.

Source: Newspaper accounts, Zora Askew 1968 article, ILCO Builders magazine, published by the Indiana Limestone Company, Inc., Volume 2, No. 4, April, 1951.