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.)
Hatty Perry — in the 1947 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory: Perry Hattie (c) pract nurse ENCS r [ditto]. In the 1950 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 309 Reid, Minnie Baines, 71; husband Roscoe, 72, building contractor; and daughter Hattie Perry, 46, practical nurse at local hospital.
Cora Farmer — in the 1947 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory: Perry Hattie (c) pract nurse ENCS r [ditto] [In fact, Cora Farmer did not live at the Sanatorium, but at 1201 Queen Street.]
Irene Farmer — in the 1940 census of Wilson, Wilson County: Jeff Farmer, 48, truck driver; wife Rena, 36, private nurse; and children Marvin, 15, and Irene, 13.
Lula Sims
Nancy Farmer
Priscilla Bullock — in the 1940 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 516 Smith Street, Hilda [sic] Bullock, 36, laborer; wife Percilla, 35, housekeeper; roomer Evelynia Martin, 18, tobacco factory hanger; and children Bettie J., 9, and Hilda J. Bullock, 7.
Bessie Gaston — in the 1940 census of Elm City, Toisnot township, Wilson County: on Dixon Street, barber Roscoe Gaston, 58, and wife Bessie, 46, housekeeper.
Did you know Wilson was the site of a Confederate hospital?
Its remnants stand at the corner of Lee and Goldsboro Streets.
In 1954, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources’ North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program installed a marker near the original site of the hospital, and the agency’s website features the startling essay below.
“The Confederacy organized its Medical Department late in 1861 and within months, in April of 1862, the North Carolina General Military Hospital No. 2 was established in Wilson in what had once been the Wilson Female Seminary. Dr. Solomon Sampson Satchwell, who had graduated from Wake Forest College and studied medicine at New York University before serving as a military surgeon with the Twenty-fifth North Carolina Infantry, was appointed Surgeon-in-Charge. In the 1864 Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal the Wilson hospital was listed as one of twenty-one principal hospitals in North Carolina. It served those wounded in fighting along the coast.
“The hospital made Wilson known outside of the state of North Carolina. Employing thirty-five to forty people, it also boosted the local economy. Most nurses and orderlies were unskilled soldiers; however, at least seven local women were known to have worked at the hospital as matrons. Their duties included food preparation and cleaning. The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad that ran through Wilson provided the military hospital with supplies, including ice and turpentine, used to treat fevers.
“Fighting never broke out in Wilson, but, on July 20, 1863, ‘an immense armament of negroes and Yankees’ advanced on Wilson. Reportedly, a group of invalids from the hospital and local militia defended Wilson by destroying the bridge over the Toisnot Swamp to halt the invaders. All of those who died at the hospital were buried in a mass grave. The hospital closed at the end of the war. When Wilson created a town cemetery, they were re-interred there with a Confederate monument erected over the site. Wilson Female Seminary reopened in the former hospital and received a charter as Wilson Collegiate Institute in 1872.”
The interpretive signboard in front of the building, erected by the North Carolina Civil War Trails program (and badly in need of a good wash), reads:
“This is the only known surviving portion of one of Wilson’s earliest school buildings, the Wilson Female Academy, which also served as a Confederate hospital during the war. Wilson’s location on the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, the principal north-south line that was linked to Virginia in Weldon by the Petersburg Railroad, made the town a good site for a hospital after the war began. On April 1, 1862, Confederate authorities seized the building for use as a general military hospital.
“Dr. Solomon S. Satchwell, the surgeon in charge, turned the forty classrooms and other rooms into wards and treated hundreds of patients there. The frame, two-story building had a two-hundred-foot-long facade and a large one-story rear addition. It also had dozens of large windows, essential for summer ventilation.
“Soldiers who died there of wounds or disease were buried near the academy grounds. In 1894, they were reinterred under a burial mound in Maplewood Cemetery two blocks north of here. The Confederate monument on top of the mound was dedicated on May 10, 1902.
“Edmund G. Lind, a British architect who emigrated to New York in 1855 and subsequently practiced in Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia, designed the Italianate-style school building. It was completed in 1859 about two blocks south of here. After the war, the former female academy and hospital served as Wilson Collegiate Institute from 1872 until it closed in 1898, when the building was separated into housing units. This section, part of the school’s rear addition, was moved here in 2005 and rehabilitated.”
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Typically, the historical marker essay makes no mention of the men and women performing the hospital’s essential grunt work. Enslaved men and women toiled as nurses, cooks, and laundresses, and the reports Dr. Satchwell was required to file regularly reveal their names.
Daniel, Samuel, Benjamin, Edy, Annie, Sarah, William, Francis, Flora, Eli, Jerry, Matilda, Harmon, Hoyt, Martha, Dorcas, Laura, Mary, Oliver, Alvana, Alfred, George, America, Isabella, Harriet, Rachel, Henry, Joseph, General, Ansley, Tilda, Minerva, Delphia, Maria, Mahala, Nicey, Chaney, Esther, Eliza, Tom, and Charles cooked, cleaned, and cared for wounded Confederate soldiers over the next two years. Pomeroy P. Clark, a Connecticut-born buggy manufacturer who arrived in Wilson in 1851, had a near-monopoly over the provision of enslaved people to the hospital, supplying almost all of the men and women named above.
Muster Roll dated 1 April 1862 showing enslaved people, at bottom left, rented to the Confederate Hospital.
This is curious. P.P. Clark is listed in 1850 slave schedule of Nash County, North Carolina, as the owner of four enslaved people. In the 1860 census of Wilson, Wilson County, he is described as a lumber manufacturer with $2000 in personal property, but is not listed in the slave schedule. We know that in 1860 Clark bought four enslaved people from John P. Clark as trustee of Nancy B. Clark. The adult in this group of four, a woman named Peggy, is not named as a hospital laborer. Peggy had once belonged to Henry Flowers, whose daughter was Nancy B. Clark. Flowers’ estate also included enslaved women named America and Isabelle, and an enslaved man named Henry (known as Harry), who married a woman named Flora around 1859. These four match names of people put to work at the Confederate Hospital, but who were the others? If Clark (who himself worked at the hospital as steward were acting as a broker for other enslavers, would Dr. Satchwell have recorded the workers as “Negro slave hired of P.P. Clark”?
In addition to enslaved people, a few free people of color worked at Confederate Hospital No. 2. On 26 May 1864, Lemon Taborn and William Jones were hired to perform unspecified work at $11.00/month. Alexander Jones was hired five days later at the same rate and, on June 1, Mord. Hagans came aboard for $10/month. The Jones cousins appear in the 1860 census of Old Fields township, Wilson County, and Mordecai Hagans in the 1860 census of Nahunta township, Wayne County.
Muster Rolls, Hospital Department, Wilson, N.C., 1862-1864, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, National Archives and Records Administration; photos by Lisa Y. Henderson.
Carolina General, a private hospital, opened in 1920 at 103 North Pine Street. It closed in 1964 and, for the 44 years of its operation, was a segregated facility. How was it then, in 1943, that Banks Blow, who was African-American, died at Carolina General rather than Mercy Hospital? (Note that he lived only two block from Mercy Hospital, which was at 504 East Green.) Ordinarily, Blow would have to have been referred by a white doctor to Carolina General for emergency treatment, but no doctor signed this death certificate or is otherwise listed as attending.
Carolina General Hospital, circa 1964. Image courtesy of digitalnc.org.
This hospital was not Eastern North Carolina Sanatorium (now Longleaf Neuro-Medical Treatment Center), which was under construction when the above facility opened and admitted its first patients in January 1943. It seems a curious duplication of scarce resources to build two TB hospitals essentially simultaneously in one small city.
By the 1970s, the Wilson County Tuberculosis Hospital building at 1808 South Goldsboro Street housed the offices of the Wilson County Cooperative Extension agency. It now houses the Wilson County Senior Activity Center.
Photo courtesy of Wilson County Senior Activity Center Facebook page.
Founded in 1913, the Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home (later known as Mercy Hospital) was one of a handful of early African-American hospitals in North Carolina and the only one in the northeast quadrant of the state. Though it struggled financially throughout its more than 50 years of operation, the hospital provided critical care to thousands who otherwise lacked access to treatment.
A small cadre of black nurses assisted the attendant physicians. One was Henrietta Colvert(1893-1980) shown below at far left. A native of Statesville in North Carolina’s western Piedmont, Henrietta received training at Saint Agnes School of Nursing in Raleigh and Good Samaritan in Charlotte. How and when she came to Wilson is unknown. However, this photograph suggests that she cared for Mercy’s patients in its earliest days as the man seated in the middle is hospital founder Dr. Frank S. Hargrave, who left Wilson for New Jersey in 1924. The man at right is Dr. William A. Mitchner.
Photograph of staff courtesy of the Freeman Round House Museum, Wilson; photograph of hospital taken by Lisa Y. Henderson, June 2013.
