Epworth Hospital: the Methodist founding, 1893–1894

Opened January 1894 — incorporated 28 May 1894

Three beds in a converted house: South Bend's second hospital was a women's work before it was an institution. The Woman's Home Missionary Societies of the Methodist Episcopal churches of South Bend, with the Dorcas Society of Milburn Church — the church later called St. Paul's — secured a house in June 1893 and had applicants for care immediately; in January 1894 a patient facility of three beds opened in the converted house under the care of a trained nurse, Miss Moore. The organization followed within the year: the dedicatory plaque of the hospital's 1901 building, found stored in the present Memorial Hospital and photographed by the hospital's own marketing coordinator for the Indiana United Methodist heritage record, reads that the Epworth Hospital and Training School was "organized May 28, 1894, and incorporated June 7, 1894," and the heritage account states the incorporation and the election of the first nine trustees on 28 May 1894 — both mechanisms stand in this record as their sources give them.

The name was the movement's own: Epworth, for the Wesley family's Lincolnshire home, and the school was in the name from the start — this was founded as a hospital and a training school for nurses together, and its first class of five nurses graduated in 1897, in the entry below. The Indiana United Methodist heritage account, resting on Roger Birdsell's "History of Epworth Hospital" in The Old Courthouse News (Fall 1980), states the founding's place in the denomination's Indiana record plainly: by all evidence, Epworth was the first hospital founded by any branch of United Methodism in Indiana, preceding the Methodist hospitals of Indianapolis and Gary by several years. Fort Wayne's Methodists had organized a city hospital in 1878; South Bend's Methodist women, sixteen years later, built one of their own denomination's — and theirs is the line that survives in the city today.

Sources:

1. Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church (INUMC), heritage account of Epworth Hospital, South Bend, resting on Roger Birdsell, "History of Epworth Hospital," The Old Courthouse News, Fall 1980 — the June 1893 house, the January 1894 three-bed opening under Miss Moore, the 28 May 1894 incorporation and nine trustees, and the first-Methodist-hospital-in-Indiana statement as the account gives it.
2. Dedicatory plaque of the 1901 Epworth building, photographed in storage at Memorial Hospital by Beacon's marketing coordinator and reproduced in the INUMC account — "organized May 28, 1894, and incorporated June 7, 1894," carried in the entry beside the heritage account's dating.
3. Memorial Hospital of South Bend, standard published history — the 1894 founding as Epworth Hospital and Training School in a converted home.