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The rival tradition, founded against the Sisters' hospital twelve years after it: when St. Joseph's (1882, Sisters of the Holy Cross — item 9 below) was South Bend's only hospital, the city's Methodists built the second tradition. The Indiana Conference's heritage record — which calls Epworth, on its evidence, the first hospital founded by any branch of United Methodism in Indiana — carries the founding whole: the ladies of the Woman's Home Missionary Societies of South Bend's Methodist Episcopal churches first established a mission home on the site; a patient facility with three beds opened in January 1894 under the care of a trained nurse, Miss Moore; and Epworth Hospital and Training School (for nurses) was organized on May 28, 1894, its first nine trustees elected that day and its incorporation following on June 7, 1894 — the dedicatory plaque the present hospital still keeps states the span exactly. The evidence classes the checklist asks for stand separately in that record: the building (a converted home first, outgrown at once; a four-story, fifty-bed facility opened in 1901 on the growing campus), the nurses (the hospital was from its first day also a training school — its school is dug whole in item 10 below — and its first caregiver of record is the trained nurse who ran the three-bed ward), and the first patients (three beds' worth, from January 1894; their names are not in the record reached, and none are invented here). The Methodist management course is dated at its end as at its start: community-wide drives expanded the plant across the decades until it encompassed, in the heritage record's summary, a new 526-bed hospital and its school of nursing; and in June 1945 the organization was reincorporated, the Methodist Church ceased to play a management role, and the hospital took the name the next article begins with. The Epworth name survives on its own ground: the satellite campus at 420 N. Niles Avenue still bears it — today Beacon's Memorial Epworth Center — and the mental-health course that name now carries is item 4's.
Sources: Indiana United Methodist Conference heritage record, "Epworth Hospital, South Bend" (inumc.org), drawing on Roger Birdsell, "History of Epworth Hospital," The Old Courthouse News (Fall 1980), and the hospital's dedicatory plaque as photographed by Beacon's marketing coordinator — the mission home, the three beds of January 1894, Miss Moore, the May 28, 1894 organization and June 7, 1894 incorporation, the June 1945 reincorporation and end of Methodist management, the 526-bed plant, the 420 N. Niles Avenue Epworth campus. Memorial Hospital of South Bend, institutional history — founded in a converted home in 1894 as Epworth Hospital and Training School; the four-story, fifty-bed building of 1901; renamed 1945.