I recently was gifted a copy of Phoebe Ann Pollitt’s African American Hospitals in North Carolina: 39 Institutional Histories, 1880-1967. Reading the Wilson entry made me realize I have not adequately set out here the ownership timeline of the hospital commonly thought of just as “Mercy Hospital.” What we think of as a single institution actually comprised three separate hospitals that operated on the same site and mostly in the same building.

(1) In 1905, Dr. Frank S. Hargrave opened a private hospital in a 16-room house on East Green Street.

(2) In 1913, Dr. Hargrave partnered with Samuel H. Vick and J.D. Reid to establish Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home in a brand-new, purpose-built brick building on the site of the old wooden house. In 1915, Wilson’s Board of Aldermen voted to contribute a small monthly amount to the hospital’s budget. The hospital — the tubercular home was never built — struggled financially and went into foreclosure in 1924. Pollitt’s timeline and facts are a little off concerning this phase of the hospital’s history. She says Commercial Bank failed in the late 1920s “due to the nationwide financial hardships of the Great Depression” and that Dr. Hargrave left Wilson for New Jersey in 1924 after losing the hospital. Hargrave did leave Wilson in 1924, but Commercial Bank did not fail until J.D. Reid and Henry S. Stanback severely and criminally mismanaged its deposits in 1929. Contemporary news accounts say the hospital J.D. Reid had kept the bank afloat with loan from the Commercial Bank secured by the hospital itself. When the bank collapsed, it dragged the hospital down, too.

(3) In 1930, white businessman Wade H. Gardner bought the hospital at auction, and a group of white doctors and businessmen, plus William Hines, set themselves up as trustees and administrators. They renamed it Mercy and commenced operation with city, county, and philanthropic support. Though the hospital’s ownership shifted a couple of times between private and public owners to render it eligible for major grants, Mercy operated continuously until 1964, when it was shuttered for good with the opening of a federally-funded, integrated hospital, Wilson Memorial. (I was born there just a few months before it closed.)