Prior to 1903, the City of Macomb did indeed have a rich history of physicians in various small offices around town.
In 1900, a full-service hospital opened in the 200 block of East Carroll street in Macomb. The people of Macomb were justified in their reasons to be proud of their new hospital-it made a great difference in the quality of lives of the people here. It was named Phelps Hospital, after the name of the donors, who provided $8,200 to be used for the purchase of the land in the 200 block of East Carroll and the construction and equipping of a hospital on that site. In return, Mrs. Phelps (then a widow) was allowed to live at the hospital for the rest of her life.
The cost of the project was grossly underestimated, and Dr. Stremmel provided an additional $7500 of his own money.
With Phelps Hospital such a success, and the fact that it situated Macomb as a regional medical center, Dr. Stremmel started a school of nursing there. It was common in those days for hospitals to offer nurses training, with the physicians on staff providing the instruction.
Three years after Dr. Stremmel founded Phelps Hospital, another doctor on staff at that location opened a second facility, the St. Francis Hospital. the St. Francis Hospital was located at the southwest corner of Grant Street and South Johnson Street.
Why a second hospital? The answer may be as simple as 'a personality conflict'. Dr. Stremmel and Dr. J. B. Bacon, the two leading physicians in town, did not get along.
Another reason was probably the realization that a single hospital situated at Phelps location was going to limit the degree to which it could expand, and it wasn't going to be sufficient to provide for the medical care of the people of Macomb and the surrounding area. Another likely reason-Dr. J.B. Bacon just plain wanted to leave Phelps Hospital.
Dr. Bacon raised $7,000. He tapped members of the community and even received a large sum from his wife, Elizabeth Bailey Bacon. The Bailey's had become wealthy through their farming, banking and business endeavors.
Dr. Bacon was aware of the sisters of St. Francis of Clinton, Iowa and their affiliations with nursing. He arranged for the sisters to contribute an additional $30,000 to operate the facility.
Building St. Francis
The sisters of St. Francis purchased five acres of ground and on June 18, 1902 they announced that a contract had been awarded to Collin's Brothers of Rock Island for the construction of a Catholic hospital in Macomb. Local contractor P.H. Tiernan would do the excavation for the building, as well as the foundation and the brick and masonry work.
The sisters hoped to move into the building by November or December 1902, but delays with the architect's plans delayed the opening of the new building until April 5, 1903. The building was dedicated by Bishop P. J. O'Reilly of Peoria on March 14, 1903.
State of The Art Hospital St. Francis Hospital was a state-of-the-art facility for that era.
The basement contained facilities for laundering clothes and doing cooking for the sisters and their patients, as well as living quarters for the sisters.
The first floor contained administrative offices and patient rooms. The second floor was entirely dedicated to patients. The third floor contained a surgical suite, including a sterilizing room, anesthesia facilities, surgical recovery rooms, and areas where doctors and nurses could prepare for surgery and shower afterwards.
The building sat at an angle so that maximum light would enter the rooms of all patients-a fascinating concept.
The heating system was such that the heat in individual rooms could be recycled according to the patient's preference.
There was an elevator accessible from both the inside and outside of the building, enabling attendants to transport patients arriving by ambulance to their rooms with minimal disturbance to others in the building.
The St. Francis Hospital in 1903 was nearly self-sufficient. By design the new medical facility would tap its own resources.
On the grounds was a building which contained machinery used to burn coal and capture the gas that was produced in the process of combustion. It could then be piped into the main building to heat it.
For many years the Catholic sisters employed a hired man who assisted them with the cultivation and harvesting of grain from their land.
In addition, they raised dairy and beef cattle, hogs and chickens. Horses were kept to pull the doctor's buggies. They used some of the grain they raised to feed their livestock, and had the rest ground into flour for baking. They were always flush with fresh milk, butter and eggs.
They had the beef cattle and the hogs butchered, and cured their own hams and bacon. And they raised a large garden and tended to an orchard. They canned and preserved large quantities of fruits and vegetables.
Many of the sisters from the mother house in Clinton, Iowa had grown up on farms and therefore had experience with farm operations and cooking on a large scale. They were well-suited for their new lives in Macomb, Illinois.
The sister's day began with their rising at 4:50am and having morning prayers at 5:15am. Officially their work days ended at 8:00pm. However, in reality their days rarely ended at 8:00pm. If they were needed somewhere in the hospital, they went. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
A Macomb Journal article marking the 10th Anniversary of the hospital stated that during those 10 years (1903-1913) Dr. Bacon, the surgeon-in-chief, had performed 2065 surgeries, all of them requiring anesthesia, and that the death rates at the hospital had been under three percent.
Expanding St. Fancis
In 1912, another wing was added to the hospital on the northwest, bringing the capacity of St. Francis to 50. In 1922, the Standard Clinic, owned and operated by Dr. A.P. Standard, added to the St. Francis Hospital a radium laboratory and new and more powerful x-ray equipment, the kind then recommended by the American Medical Society as effective in the treatment of cancer.
A second addition was made in 1929, a southeast wing, at the cost of $75,000. The first floor of this new wing was devoted to obstetrics and the second and third floors to surgical and medical patients. With this expansion, 35 new patient rooms were added. Like Phelps Hospital, the St. Francis Hospital had a school of nursing from early on.
St. Francis and World War II
As the facility grew, the number of sisters and student nurses increased, so a white, two-story house was constructed and added to the complex. It provided housing and remained until recent years.
During World War II, the St. Francis Hospital School of Nursing reached beyond the immediate community to open its doors to the U.S. Nursing Corps Training Program. The cadet nurses trained at the school then served our country during the war in the Army, the Navy and the Red Cross.
To accommodate these cadet nurses, the sisters made one more expansion. They built a modern L-shaped residence and classroom facility southwest of the hospital. In recent years that addition was used as an apartment building-it now sits abandoned.
The roof of that building was shingled by prisoners of war from Camp Ellis in Fulton County. The facility was named Thaddeus Hall, after Sister Thaddeus, who was a driving force at the hospital from the very beginning.
Plans to Build a New St. Francis
On August 11, 1949, Sister Mary Magdelen of the Order of St. Francis in Clinton, Iowa, announced plans to construct a brand new St. Francis Hospital building in Macomb. As it was, the existing building was overcrowded. In fact, the peak times showed that the number of patients it cared for was as much as 70% above its capacity.
The new St. Francis was to be a five-story, 125 bed structure located to the south of the existing building and was to cost $1,800,000.
Plans were drawn up by architects Morgan, Gelatt and Associates of Burlington, Iowa.
A 19 page booklet was printed explaining the need for the new facility. The sisterhood was to supply a portion of the needed funds and the community of Macomb the rest.
The fundraising effort failed, and money that had been collected was returned. Overcrowding continued to be a problem at St. Francis and neither that building or the Phelps Hospital could continue to meet federal requirements. Macomb Makes a Choice
Two plans were proposed to resolve Macomb's community problem. One plan called for the renovation of the existing St. Francis Hospital building. The other plan called for the construction of a new nondenominational hospital.
In November of 1954, the community held a referendum to resolve the matter, and the outcome was to support the construction of the facility that would be called McDonough District Hospital.
On December 3, 1954, Rev. Weishar of the Diocese stated that St. Francis would close in 18 months. However, Phelps Hospital was also on the verge of closing (eventually closed in 1966), and the absence of both would mean that the people of Macomb would have been left, for a time, without a hospital. St. Francis agreed to stay open until the new hospital was ready.
The End of St. Francis Hospital in Macomb McDonough District Hospital opened June 30, 1958 and St. Francis Hospital was closed in June of 1967. Seven years later, in 1974, the building was demolished. St. Francis Hospital had served the Macomb community for 64 years and made a huge impact on many people's lives in the Macomb area.
