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 institution dates from the organization of the Lutheran Hospital Association in 1903, under the leadership of the Reverend Philip Wambsganss — the name is also spelled Philipp — pastor of Emmaus Lutheran Church and the association's president, whom the Lutheran Foundation's history calls the hospital's founder. The association bought the twenty-one-room brick residence of Judge Lindley M. Ninde at Fairfield and Wildwood avenues and remodeled it into a twenty-five-bed hospital, which was dedicated and opened on Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1904, with Louise Hitzeman as its first administrator. The financing is part of the city's folk record as well as its documented one: the Lutheran Foundation's tradition holds that farm families of the surrounding counties took second mortgages on their farms to raise the hospital's money — stated here as the tradition the foundation itself tells. Growth on the Fairfield site was continuous: an addition within three months of opening was already planned to bring the hospital to seventy-five rooms by 1906; an internship program for medical students began in 1950; and in 1953–56 the original house was replaced entirely by a $3 million hospital of more than three hundred beds, dedicated in 1956. The Fairfield hospital's clinical firsts, as the network's own timeline gives them, mark the city's medical coming of age: the first renal dialysis unit in Indiana in 1961, the community's first coronary care unit in 1967, and in 1970 the community's first coronary bypass surgery and first coronary angiogram. By the 1980s the hospital was landlocked in its South Wayne neighborhood. It bought acreage at Interstate 69 and U.S. 24 in 1981, announced the new building in 1987, and in 1992 completed the move to a new $92 million hospital at 7950 West Jefferson Boulevard. The old Fairfield hospital was demolished in stages; by 5 March 2001 the last of it was gone.

Sources:

1. Lutheran Health Network, 120th-anniversary release (November 2024) and Lutheran Foundation history (The Waynedale News, 2004) — planning as early as 1878; the association's organization in 1903 under the Rev. Philip (Philipp) Wambsganss; the purchase of Judge Lindley M. Ninde's twenty-one-room residence at Fairfield and Wildwood; dedication and opening on Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1904, at twenty-five beds; Louise Hitzeman, first administrator; the second-mortgage tradition stated as tradition.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Lutheran Hospital page, copied from the hospital's Wikipedia account and the Historic Oakdale Neighborhood Association history — the addition planned within three months, the 1953–56 replacement hospital at $3 million and more than 300 beds, the 1981 land purchase, the 1987 announcement, the $92 million 1992 hospital and move, and the old building's demolition complete by 5 March 2001.
3. Lutheran Hospital timeline (hospitalsdata.com, from the hospital's own history) — the 1950 internship program, the 1961 first renal dialysis unit in Indiana, the 1967 first coronary care unit, and the 1970 coronary bypass and angiogram firsts.