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 stands in the Indiana United Methodist heritage account by John R. Riggs and in Parkview's own fact sheets — and opened on 19 October 1878. Where it first opened is told two ways in the genealogical society's copied accounts, and both stand: one account has the hospital starting on 21 July 1878 in the former Purman mansion at Hanna and Lewis streets; the other has it opening briefly in the William S. Edsall residence at West Main and Webster streets and then moving to Hanna and Lewis, where it stayed five years. The physician William H. Myers is named in the copied accounts, citing Griswold's 1917 history, as the major force behind the founding. In 1883 the hospital moved to the Oliver S. Hanna homestead at Barr Street and Washington Boulevard — one copied account mistypes the move as 1893 — and there it took the name it carried into the twentieth century: it was renamed Hope Hospital in 1891, a name some accounts say was made official only in 1900, after donations from the family of Jesse Williams. The Williams money and the new name began the hospital's second life. A new Hope Hospital building opened at 119 West Lewis Street in 1917–18, and in 1918 the Methodist Episcopal Church's Indianapolis hospital took control: the institution became Hope Methodist, and in 1922 simply Methodist Hospital. The Methodist decades were lean ones — the Lewis Street hospital carried debt through the Depression — until a reorganization in 1941 put it on a debt-free footing as Fort Wayne Methodist Hospital. Its work is woven through the Epidemics record: Methodist Hospital on Lewis Street was the city's polio hospital, its iron lungs serviced by the men of Fire Station No. 3, and in 1947 it hired Mrs. Frank King, the first Black professional nurse on any Fort Wayne hospital staff, two years before Lutheran's nursing school admitted its first Black student. In 1943 the hospital's leaders opened the campaign for a new building; the war delayed it, but the campaign is the direct parent of the Randallia hospital in the next entry. The Lewis Street site's afterlife is a landmark of another kind: it is now the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory.

Sources:

1. John R. Riggs, Indiana United Methodist heritage history of Parkview — the 1878 organization as Fort Wayne City Hospital, the 1918 Methodist takeover, the 1922 Methodist Hospital name, the debt-free 1941 reorganization as Fort Wayne Methodist Hospital, and the 1943 new-hospital campaign.
2. Parkview Health fact sheets (2023–2026) — the system's own lineage: Fort Wayne City Hospital (1878), Hope Hospital (1891–1922), Methodist Hospital (1922–1953).
3. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Hope Hospital / Parkview pages, copied from local accounts citing Griswold (1917), p. 480 — the two conflicting accounts of the first home (Purman mansion at Hanna and Lewis from 21 July 1878; Edsall residence at West Main and Webster, then Hanna and Lewis), William H. Myers's role, the 1883 move to the Hanna homestead (one copy mistyping 1893), the Jesse Williams donations, the 119 West Lewis Street building of 1917–18, and the Lewis Street site as the present Botanical Conservatory.
4. Epidemics section of this history — Methodist Hospital in the polio years, its iron lungs and Fire Station No. 3; Schools record — Mrs. Frank King's 1947 hiring at Methodist.