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 documented in the order's own history, in the diocesan press, and in the genealogical society's copied accounts. The building began as the Rockhill House, a hotel built in 1838 by William Rockhill; the hotel closed in 1867, and the smallpox epidemic of 1865 had already made the city's need plain. Bishop John Henry Luers, the first bishop of Fort Wayne, bought the sixty-five-room hotel and formed the St. Joseph Benevolent Association to hold it. The accounts differ on the purchase itself, and both stand: the order's tradition credits Bishop Luers with buying the hotel with his own money, while Sister Virginia Kampwerth's history of the province, With Loving Concern, quotes Sister Rose Blum's letter that Father Edward Koenig purchased the building for $52,000 on 11 January 1869 and gave it to the sisters. The hospital opened on 4 May 1869. Its nurses and administrators were the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, a German congregation Bishop Luers had invited in 1868 precisely because his diocese was heavily German-speaking: eight sisters left Dernbach on 8 August 1868, made the order's first American mission at Hessen Cassel, south of the city, on 30 August 1868, and three of them came on to Fort Wayne to open the hospital. For its first half-century the Broadway hospital was more than a hospital to the order: it served as the congregation's American motherhouse until the motherhouse moved to Donaldson, Indiana, in the early 1920s. The Schools section of this history notes the same founding from the education side — the bishop who bought the Rockhill House is the Bishop Luers the city's Catholic high school is named for.

Sources:

1. Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, congregational and St. Joseph Hospital histories — the 4 May 1869 opening, the Rockhill House purchase, the eight sisters' August 1868 departure from Dernbach and the Hessen Cassel mission of 30 August 1868, and the hospital's years as American motherhouse until the move to Donaldson.
2. Sister Virginia Kampwerth, PHJC, With Loving Concern, quoting Sister Rose Blum — Father Edward Koenig's purchase of the building for $52,000 on 11 January 1869, the variant attribution carried in the entry.
3. Today's Catholic (Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend) — the first birth at the hospital, 7 March 1914, and the hospital's place in diocesan history.
4. Schools section of this history — Bishop Luers's 1868 purchase of the Rockhill House to found St. Joseph, noted in the Bishop Luers High School entry.