Wake Forest is unique in that it can boast of having three hospitals, all long gone and little remembered.
There is almost no information about the hospital on the Wake Forest College campus at some point during the Civil War. We do know that several huts were built on the campus, the 1838 building was used – all the students and many professors were away fighting – and some of the few homes that existed then may have been pressed into service. The wounded soldiers arrived by train on open flat cars. Those who died would probably have been buried in the Wake Forest Cemetery, but they cannot be found there now.
After the war, women’s groups and others wanted a cemetery only for those who died in the war. George Mordecai donated two-and-a-half acres, part of his large plantation, that is now part of Oakwood Cemetery. Volunteers helped fell and clear the trees and then disinter and rebury soldier caskets from all over Wake County.
The second was the Wake Forest College Hospital, completed in 1906 to serve as the student infirmary and as a hospital for some local patients. A square two-story building with third-floor dormers and wide pillared verandahs on each story spanning three sides, it stood at the intersection of South Avenue (Durham Road, N.C. 98) and Wingate Street. It also was used by the college’s two-year School of Medicine. (A photograph of the hospital was the background for the “Foreword” in the Centennial book, “Connections . . . 100 Years of Wake Forest History.)
It did admit local pregnant women who delivered babies there, and there was a full Mothers Plaque on a wall. However, as Dr. G.W. Paschal wrote in “A History of Wake Forest College, “In May 1915, on the complaint of certain ladies of Wake Forest, for the protection of immature students no maternity cases were allowed in the hospital.”
The hospital and the medical professors and students may have helped keep the college deaths to only one student when the Spanish Flu came to Wake Forest on Sept. 14, 1918.
That was registration day at the college. By nightfall, all the College Hospital beds were full and the Euzelian dormitory in Old Main, the first college building, was converted to a hospital ward. Sixty percent of the students and eight faculty members fell ill, cared for largely by the three doctors on the School of Medicine faculty.
The number of deaths among townspeople has not been tallied, but it was substantial enough that the town purchased a tent to use at Wake Forest Cemetery to protect the many mourners from the fall and winter weather.
The School of Medicine was lured away to Winston-Salem in 1941 as the nucleus for the new Bowman Gray School of Medicine connected to North Carolina Baptist Hospital.
The Wake Forest Hospital no longer had a function and was demolished shortly thereafter. (If a reader knows a date for the demolition, please pass it on to the editor.)
For years afterward, all the hospitals in Wake County were in Raleigh.
There was Rex Hospital, which in 1941 stood on Wade Avenue. It had been founded in 1894 with funding from John Rex’s will of 1839 to serve the “sick and afflicted poor” and only added paying patients a year or two later. In its original locations near the center of Raleigh the hospital served both black and white patients, but that changed in 1896 when St. Agnes Hospital was established on the campus of St. Augustine’s College.
St. Agnes was to become the largest hospital serving the black community between Atlanta and Washington, D.C. In 1904 fire destroyed the original building, and the new stone building (now just a shell) was complete in 1909.
Dr. Harold Glascock and Dr. A.R. Tucker built Mary Elizabeth Hospital next to St. Mary’s Street in 1914. It became famous for administering the first blood transfusion in 1978, but it is remembered fondly by Raleigh and Wake natives for the many babies delivered there.
(In the application to have the Mary Elizabeth Hospital placed on the National Register of Historic Places, there is a reference to an early Raleigh hospital, St. John’s, which opened in 1878. The editor could not find any other information.)
It was not until 1961 that Wake Memorial Hospital opened on New Bern Avenue as a public hospital to serve all the county’s patients, black and white. St. Agnes closed that same year.
After one bond referendum failed, in 1955 Wake County voters approved $5 million in bonds to build the 380-bed hospital and four 20-bed hospitals in Wake Forest, Apex, Zebulon and Fuquay-Varina.
Those four outlying hospital buildings were completed in 1960 before the Raleigh hospital opened, but providing the operating money to open the four was a problem.
The state had paved South Allen Road from Wait Avenue to the hospital site, but through 1960, 1961 and 1962 the Wake Forest hospital remained closed although those in Zebulon and Fuquay-Varina were opened.
It was a source of great local frustration. Individuals and civic clubs appealed to Wake County Commissioner W.W. Holding Jr., a town native, and sent delegations to the entire county board.
It was not until Jan. 7, 1963, that the hospital opened after an open house on Dec. 20 that drew 559 people. The hospital was staffed by local doctors: Dr. George Mackie, Dr. George Corbin, Dr. A.N. Corpening, Dr. C.T. Wilkinson and Dr. R.W. Wilkinson. Sybil Swett was named the director of nursing.
The hospital was a focal point for the community. For years The Wake Weekly reported every patient’s name and every birth. (The newspaper also ran a weekly column called “Social & Local,” which listed who had visited whom and other news like birthdays. It was not thought to be intrusive – you had to tell Estelle about the visitors – and if you were new to town, having her call was a sign of inclusion.)
Through the years, though, the small hospitals experienced problems as more services were offered by the larger hospitals and improved roads made it easier to get to Raleigh or Durham. By 1993, what was then called Northern Wake Hospital only had an average of five patients per day and it closed in 1994 although it was operated as a day hospital for two more years.
Vacant for several years, the building still stands on South Allen Road and is now owned and used by Church Initiative Inc.
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2 Responses
A further comment on the W F Branch Hospital. Why was it built in such an out of the way place, rather than in the downtown area?
W.W. Holding, Jr and Henry Miller both wanted to give the land for it. The only place where they owned adjoining land was on South Allen Road! The first summer that I worked on the farm (1958) we built the fence that separated the remainder of Mr. Holding’s land.
The College Infirmary remained in use until the college moved, and was demolished. The Seminary later built the women’s dormitory on the site.
Dr. George Mackie was the College Physician. His daily routine was to go to the Post Office in the morning, then to the Infirmary, and then to his office on North Main Street after lunch. From childhood I remember being taken to see him in the Infirmary.
The Med School had to move in 1941-when here the School had as a 2 year program where the academic courses were offered. Since there was no hospital affiliated with the school , its students had to go to a 4-year school for the third and fourth years of clinic studies. Wake Forest had a relationship with Jefferson College of Medicine in Philadelphia. Dr Mackie went there and Came home with a wife. Drs. C.T and R.W. Wilkinson went to Tulane in New Orleans; and Dr C.T. came home with a wife. Kathleen Mackie and Ursula Wilkinson were truly Pillars of the Community during their lives.