Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home

Wilson’s remarkable hospital.

On 22 February 1914, the Wilmington Morning Star published this detailed account of the establishment of the Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Hospital, which eventually became Mercy Hospital. Originally envisioned with a farm, countryside cottages, and a nurses’ home, only the administrative building was built. Nonetheless, Dr. Frank S. Hargrave‘s vision was “remarkable” indeed, and the hospital served the community for 50 years. (I was born there, in fact, just before it closed.)

[Sidenote: Hospital co-founder J.D. Reid was principal of the Colored Graded School and advisory board member Charles L. Coon was school superintendent. That Samuel H. Vick broke with them just four years later to side with teachers and parents in the 1918 school boycott is all the more astonishing.]

Where was the Tubercular Home?

When Dr. Frank S. Hargrave and Samuel H. Vick envisioned the healthcare facility they would found to treat African-American patients in Wilson, it had two parts — a hospital and a “tubercular home,” i.e. sanatorium, outside town limits.

Wilson Hospital opened on East Green Street in 1913. Later that year, Sam Vick sold a forty-acre parcel south of downtown to The Wilson Tubercular Home, Inc., for $5000.   Vick had bought the parcel in 1902 from S.W. and Jean S. Venable.

Deed book 97, page 313, Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

Despite reports that a building on the site was near completion, the Tubercular Home apparently never opened. 

With the help of Wilson County’s GIS Coordinator Will Corbett, I have identified the rough location of “high sandy knoll self-drained and one-third of which is covered with native pines” upon which a sanatorium and patient cottages were to be built. Pinpointing the area will require additional research in the Register of Deeds office.

Reid writes of “splendid progress” made on hospital and home for tuberculosis patients.

J.D. Reid, principal of the Colored Graded School, was also secretary/treasurer of Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home (later known as Mercy Hospital) and its chief fundraiser. The institution was meant to encompass two sites — an intown hospital and a “tubercular home” on a farm just outside of Wilson. More about the latter in a future post.

Wilson Daily Times, 9 December 1913.

The greatest event of its kind among Afro-Americans.

Wilson Daily Times, 23 November 1913.

[The land was surely purchased from Dr. Frank S. Hargrave, not W.S., and I intend to figure out exactly where it was.]

[Update, 20 February 2023: actually, per deed, Samuel H. Vick sold the hospital the acreage for $5000 in November 1913. He had purchased it several years earlier.]

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The Negro and tuberculosis.

The Daily Times lauded the efforts of African-Americans to raise money to build a hospital and sanatorium, noting the potential benefit to white people, too. “When … it is considered that colored servants, nursemaids, laundresses, gardeners and cooks do the bulk of the menial tasks for the whites of the South, the danger of so large a floating population of ignorant, dangerous consumptives is intensified.”

Wilson Daily Times, 10 December 1912.