Epworth's building, its nurses, and its first patients: 1897–1945

New building dedicated 6 October 1901 — 50 beds

The house becomes a hospital plant: The converted house filled at once. By January 1897 the hospital's own early count, carried in the United Methodist heritage account, stood at 132 surgical and 152 medical patients treated — and among them, twenty-two cases of typhoid fever, the epidemic load of the 1890s carried here at the size of the institution's own ledger, the epidemic telling itself belonging to the Wars and branch record. The school kept pace with the wards: the first class of five nurses graduated in 1897 under the superintendent, Miss Margaret Brennan, and one of that class, Clara Carr, was herself superintendent of the hospital from 1903 to 1910. The permanent plant came with the new century, and it came from the carriage works: gifts of land and money from Clement Studebaker and his wife — Ann in the heritage account's telling, Anna on the building's plaque — and from Jeanette Reynolds permitted a new hospital, a four-story building of fifty beds, dedicated on 6 October 1901; the plaque erected in the Studebakers' memory survives in the present hospital's storage as the founding generation's own inscription.

A brick nurses' residence followed in 1916. Thereafter the heritage account carries the growth at summary size: community-wide drives for the area hospitals allowed continued expansion until at last the physical plant encompassed a new 526-bed hospital and a school of nursing — the 526-bed figure undated in the account, and printed here as it stands there, against the dated figures the state's record gives in the present-day entry below. The old fabric went the way of hospital fabric: photographs in the South Bend Tribune's archive, held at Indiana Memory, show the demolition of the oldest section of Memorial Hospital — the original Epworth building — to make room for parking on the grown campus. The campus itself never moved: it grew where the 1901 building stood, between Michigan Street and Niles Avenue, and a building at 420 North Niles Avenue still bears the Epworth name, as the psychiatry entries below tell.

Sources:

1. Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church (INUMC), heritage account of Epworth Hospital — the January 1897 patient counts (132 surgical, 152 medical, 22 of them typhoid), the first graduating class of 1897 under Margaret Brennan, Clara Carr's superintendency of 1903–1910, the 1901 building and the Studebaker and Reynolds gifts, the 1916 nurses' residence, and the undated 526-bed endpoint of the community drives.
2. Dedicatory plaque of the 1901 building, as photographed and transcribed in the INUMC account — the dedication of 6 October 1901 and "Clem Studebaker and his wife Ann Studebaker," the Ann/Anna variance carried in the entry.
3. Indiana Memory, South Bend Tribune Photographs collection — the demolition of the oldest section of Memorial Hospital, originally Epworth Hospital, for parking.