Orange is now learning to adapt to living without a hospital, but 95 years ago the city was using one of the most modern medical centers in the country.
Frances Ann Lutcher Hospital opened in the summer of 1921. It was built as a gift to the city by the widow of the lumber millionaire Henry Jacob Lutcher and named in her honor.
In honor of the new hospital, Mrs. Lutcher had a booklet printed on slick paper with more than a dozen black and white photographs of the hospital, grounds and two-story house built for the nurses studying at the hospital’s school. The Orange Public Library has a non-lending copy for people to view.
Residents of Orange, now deceased, who remembered the days before Frances Ann Lutcher Hospital, talked about a small clinic or hospital on 16th Street. The operating room had an expansive skylight to provide sunshine for the surgeons to see. Surgery could be difficult at night or on a cloudy day.
Frances Ann Lutcher Hospital took that into account. The hospital, according to the booklet, boasted “Edison himself would be delighted at the effective use of electricity.”
The new hospital had two operating rooms. One with a skylight and the second with a “Noshado” light “so that the emergency operations at night or on cloudy days can be carried on with perfect safety.”
The operating complex had a surgeons’ dressing room with lockers, a “shower bath of porcelain,” and lavatories custom made with “knee and foot controls.”
In the history book “Picturing Orange,” the late historian and physician Dr. Howard Williams said Mrs. Lutcher wanted to build the hospital because she had seen horrid accidents at the lumber mills in town. The Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company owned two of those mills.
The Lumber World Review magazine in 1921 reported the hospital cost $300,000 to build and equip. The U.S. Consumer Price Index inflation calculation shows that would be the equivalent of a little more than $4 million today.
The hospital was four-stories with room for 60 patients. Like most places in Texas at the time, the hospital was segregated by skin color. The hospital had room for 44 whites and 16 “colored.” Private rooms and beds in wards were available.
Orange at the time was the only incorporated city in the county. In the 1920 census, the city had a population of 9,212, with another 6,167 people living in the rural areas, for a county total of 15,379.
“This hospital was constructed with the sole purpose of building a thoroughly modern hospital for surgical and medical patients,” the booklet said. “In the building and equipment of the hospital no expense was spared.”
Mrs. Lutcher and her family (likely daughters Miriam Lutcher Stark and Carrie Lutcher Brown) traveled across the country with the architect and the physician overseeing the design. They went to the “leading hospitals” to see equipment and designs.
The building was considered fireproof because it was built of reinforced concrete covered in red brick.
With the landscaped gardens and culinary kitchen, the hospital was almost considered a resort. The dedication booklet sounded like a vacation brochure in places. “This delightful hotel for the sick is situated in one of Texas’ oldest towns—Orange—looking out over the gardens and housetops to wide flat distances fringed by tall pines, while just out of sight the Sabine River winds towards the Gulf of Mexico and is an inland waterway of great commercial value.”
Frances Ann Lutcher Hospital was a four-story building between Second and Third Streets off Green Avenue northward to Pine Avenue. It closed in the mid-1960s and was demolished in the early 1970s. A nursing home stands at the site now. The live oak trees circling the block were planted for the hospital.
The entrance was on Second Street with an emergency entrance for ambulances on Third Street. The circular drive to the emergency side was raised like on a hill and the dedication booklet described the landscaped grounds below as a “sunken garden.”
The complex had a “large” residence for the “physician in charge.” On the opposite side, near Green Avenue, was the spacious Nurses Residence. Nursing students lived in the house, which included two living rooms with a piano and a Victrola. The women nursing students could live at the house while working and studying at the hospital. Walkways led from the house to the hospital. After three years of courses and work, a woman earned the title of “registered nurse.” The nurses’ home was later owned by a private citizen and burned about 1980.
The hospital also had an automatic electric elevator running through all four floors. The air was “washed, cooled or warmed by the Johnson System.” Each room had its own thermostat. The description sounds like air-conditioning, which would have been rare at the time. Mrs. Lutcher installed air-conditioning in 1912 at the First Presbyterian Church she built in honor of her husband.
Each floor, along with the “colored ward” had a glassed-in sun porch with what appears to be wicker furniture. The booklet described it as “reed furniture, cretonne covered.”
“Artistic bird cages filled with canaries who vie in trills with the mockingbird and cardinals in the beautiful grounds give a touch of hominess that is very comforting,” the booklet spoke about the porches.
Dr. Williams, who practiced at the hospital after he moved to Orange in 1953, wrote a recollection of the physicians’ dining room, which had china and silverware. Gourmet dinners were prepared by the hospital’s kitchen staff for the doctors.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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