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The succession, school by school: South Bend's nurses were made, for most of a century, in its hospitals, and both hospital traditions kept a school. (1) The Epworth school: Epworth Hospital was founded as Epworth Hospital and Training School in 1894 — the training was in the corporate name from the first day, and the three-bed ward of January 1894 was already in the care of a trained nurse, Miss Moore. The school took its hospital's 1945 renaming as its own, becoming the Memorial Hospital School of Nursing, and it closed in 1988, ninety-four years after it opened — the state's nursing-school record (the Indiana nursing newsletter's school list, preserved by Ball State's digital collections) gives the whole line in one entry: opened 1894 as Epworth Hospital and Training School, changed to Memorial in 1945, closed 1988. (2) The St. Joseph's school: Saint Joseph's Hospital School of Nursing opened in South Bend in 1907, the Sisters of Holy Cross's school — Saint Mary's College's own nursing history and the state list agree on the year. (3) The merger: Sister Maria Amadeo, C.S.C., established the Holy Cross Central School of Nursing in 1949, a three-year diploma program standardizing training across the congregation's five hospitals in Illinois and Indiana, and the state list records St. Joseph's school merged into it in 1950, its last class graduating in 1952 — the 1949 establishment and the 1950 merger printing together as the two sources give them. Central's graduates could add a fourth or fifth year at Saint Mary's to earn the Bachelor of Science in Nursing, which is the bridge to the successor.
The college program that succeeded them: the baccalaureate line at Saint Mary's College is older than the merger it outlived — in 1935 Sister Maria Amadeo launched a five-year baccalaureate nursing program at Saint Mary's, the first in Indiana and one of the earliest in the country on the college's account — and its course is told whole so the succession does not pretend a straight line: the baccalaureate program's final students graduated in 1962 and it closed for want of funds for faculty, equipment and clinical opportunity; eleven years later, in 1973, Saint Mary's reestablished nursing, accredited by the state board and the National League for Nursing, and it has run continuously since, growing to the Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a direct-entry Master of Science in Nursing and a Doctor of Nursing Practice, with a Center for Integrated Healthcare Education built in Regina Hall on a 2021 Lilly Endowment grant. The hospital diploma schools are gone — Memorial's in 1988, St. Joseph's into the 1950 merger — and the college program at Notre Dame, in the sisters' own college across from the university, is where the county's nursing line now runs: the same congregation that opened a hospital school in 1907 carries the succession in degree form in 2026. Osceola's share is the boundary share of this section — the township's nurses were trained in these schools and its sick were nursed by their graduates, and no school of nursing ever stood on this ground in any record reached, the negative Health & Care's directory findings already imply and this article now states at school strength.
Sources: Indiana State Nurses Association newsletter, Indiana nursing-schools list (Ball State University digital collections) — Memorial Hospital School of Nursing: opened 1894 as Epworth Hospital and Training School, changed to Memorial 1945, closed 1988; Saint Joseph's Hospital School of Nursing: opened 1907, merged 1950 to form Holy Cross Central School of Nursing, last class graduated 1952. Saint Mary's College, "Nursing Programs Secure Enduring Support" (2025) — the sisters opened Saint Joseph Hospital School of Nursing in 1907; the 1935 five-year baccalaureate program, first in Indiana; Holy Cross Central established 1949 under Sister Maria Amadeo, with the Saint Mary's degree path; the baccalaureate's 1962 closing and 1973 reestablishment; the present BSN, MSN and DNP; the 2021 Lilly Endowment grant and Regina Hall center. Indiana United Methodist heritage record — Epworth as a training school from its 1894 organization, Miss Moore.