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For its first half-century Fort Wayne had no hospital at all: the sick were nursed at home by family, neighbors and visiting sisters, and what public provision existed, the pest house and the county poor farm, was built for isolation and poverty rather than treatment. The first hospital came in 1869, when St. Joseph opened at 700 Broadway in the converted Rockhill House hotel; it grew into a nine-story institution, carried the region's only burn center in its modern decades, and closed in 2021 after 152 years. The city's own hospital line runs from the Fort Wayne City Hospital organized in 1878 through Hope and Methodist to Parkview Memorial, dedicated on 8 November 1953 on the Randallia campus after a building campaign. The section follows each institution's buildings, orders and mergers as the record gives them, including the places where the record disagrees with itself.
Before hospitals: care at home, the pest house, and the poor farm
1844 — 1869
No hospital at all: For its first half-century Fort Wayne had no hospital, and the sick were nursed where they lived — by family, by neighbors, by the religious sisters who visited the poor, and by physicians who made house calls…
St. Joseph Hospital: the first hospital, 1869
Opened 4 May 1869 — 700 Broadway
A hotel becomes a hospital: St. Joseph Hospital, at 700 Broadway, was Fort Wayne's first hospital, and the claim rests on more than the institution's own telling: the building, the purchase, and the sisters who staffed it are…
St. Joseph's long course: growth, the burn center, the sale, and the closing of 2021
1929 — 13 November 2021
One hundred fifty-two years on Broadway: The hospital the sisters opened in a converted hotel grew into a nine-story institution of more than four hundred beds. The Broadway building that stood at the end was built in 1929. St.…
The city hospital line: City Hospital, Hope, and Methodist, 1878–1953
Organized 1878 — the line that became Parkview
The municipal beginning: Parkview Health traces its origin to 1878, and the record underneath the claim is a real one, though not the record of a purpose-built hospital. Fort Wayne City Hospital was organized in 1878 — the date…
Parkview Memorial and the Randallia campus, 1953
Dedicated 8 November 1953 — State Street at Randallia
The hospital the campaign built: The new hospital rose on the city's northeast side, at East State Street and Randallia Drive. Ground was broken on 12 August 1951, and on 8 November 1953 the $3 million Parkview Memorial Hospital…
Parkview becomes a system: 1995, the north campus, and the Regional Medical Center of 2012
System incorporated May 1995 — PRMC opened March 2012
From one hospital to fifteen: For four decades Parkview was a single hospital on Randallia. The system era began in May 1995, when Parkview Health System, Inc. was incorporated and the hospitals at Columbia City (Parkview…
Lutheran Hospital: the Fairfield Avenue hospital, 1904–1992
Dedicated Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1904 — Fairfield at Wildwood
The Lutherans build their own: Lutheran Hospital was the city's third great hospital founding, and like St. Joseph's it began in someone else's house. Plans for a Lutheran hospital had been talked of as early as 1878, but the…
The sale of Lutheran, the CHS era, and the fight of 2017–18
Sold 1 August 1995 — dispute settled 19 November 2018
From church hospital to chain hospital: On 1 August 1995 the Lutheran Hospital Association sold the assets of Lutheran Hospital of Indiana to a subsidiary of Quorum Health Group. The price is in conflict in the record and both…
The Lutheran sister hospitals: Dupont, the Orthopedic Hospital, Rehabilitation, and Children's
2001 — today
A network takes shape: Lutheran Health Network's Fort Wayne hospitals beyond the Jefferson Boulevard flagship are specialty and neighborhood institutions, each documented in brief. Dupont Hospital, at 2520 East Dupont Road on the…
The veterans' hospital: the Fort Wayne VA Medical Center, 1949
Opened 1949 — Lake Avenue
A full medical center, not a clinic: Fort Wayne's federal hospital is sometimes described as a clinic outpost of the VA hospital at Marion; the Department of Veterans Affairs' own history says otherwise. The Fort Wayne VA Medical…
The state institution and the mental-health record: Fort Wayne State School to the Developmental Center
In Fort Wayne 1890 — closed 18 April 2007
The state hospital question, answered exactly: Fort Wayne never had a general state psychiatric hospital of the kind Indiana built at Indianapolis, Evansville, Logansport, and Richmond. What it had — for 117 years — was the…
Nursing schools in brief, and the two-system city
1897 — today
Where the nurses came from: For most of the twentieth century each great hospital trained its own nurses in a three-year diploma school, and the full record of those schools is in the Schools section of this history…
