Wake Forest is unique in that it can boast of having two hospitals, both of which are long gone and little remembered. (And that is setting aside the years in the 1860s when all the campus buildings and some of the very few private homes were turned into a hospital for the Confederate wounded who came here by train from battlefields in Virginia.)
The first 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.
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.
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.
One Response
I worked at Northern Wake Hospital for a few years after a long tenure at Big Wake in Raleigh and sure did love it!! Miss that little hospital and the people there!!