#Civil war hospital washi full#

Providence offered a range of accommodations, from indigent wards (simple beds lined up in large halls) to private suites, complete with bedroom, bath and large parlor with fireplace, at a cost of fifty to seventy-five dollars weekly. With 250 beds, the hospital remained the largest in Washington through the turn of the century, despite the arrival of a number of competing institutions. Architectural historian James Goode has described it as combining a “bracketed” Italianate vocabulary-wide-bracketed eaves, a flat façade and heavy lintels-with Second Empire motifs, such as a mansard roof and delicate ornamental ironwork cresting. A Congressional charter in 1864 was followed by several appropriations that allowed the hospital to begin constructing a large new building in 1866.Ĭompleted in 1872, the Second Empire–style main hospital building had a rather stiff, institutional look. Toner, who served as the house physician. The “high and healthy” perch on Capitol Hill became known as Bloody Hill as Providence cared for countless soldiers from both the North and the South throughout the conflict.Īfter its wartime baptism by fire, Providence continued as the city’s preeminent hospital under the leadership of Sister Beatrice Duffy (circa 1827–1899), as well as Dr.

#Civil war hospital washi full#

At Providence, the beautifully ornamented grounds were soon full of tents groaning with the wounded, as the hospital building itself could accommodate very few patients. The Washington Infirmary, the city's only other permanent hospital, burned to the ground in November 1861 and was never reconstructed. Numerous temporary hospitals were quickly established in converted churches and hotels, and government buildings were requisitioned as infirmaries throughout the city. After Bull Run and subsequent Civil War battles, the wounded began pouring into Washington. We can imagine what a relief it would be to the invalid to be transferred from the hot and dusty city to the grateful shade of this cool and quiet retreat. The is large and airy, the location high and healthy, and the grounds extensive and beautifully ornamented with shade and fruit trees, and gravelled walks. A notice in The National Intelligencer about the opening of the hospital paints an idyllic picture: The sisters opened their hospital a month before the Battle of Bull Run, the first major engagement of the war, when no one was imagining yet what horrors would await medical facilities like Providence. The original hospital in the Nicholson mansion. Toner (1825–1896), a leader among the city’s physicians and the future founder of the Columbia Historical Society, to serve as its first formal head. Gwynn persuaded the descendants of Daniel Carroll, one of the original major landowners of Washington, to donate the old Nicholson Mansion at 2nd and D Streets, SE, for the hospital's use and convinced Dr. The Roman Catholic Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul had been busy opening hospitals throughout the U.S., and Sister Lucy Gwynn (1800-1865) spearheaded the effort to start a hospital in Washington. In April 1861, after war was declared, this hospital was taken over by the military, and a new hospital for the general population was urgently needed. Providence Hospital on Capitol Hill, circa 1910 (author's collection).īefore Providence, there was only one hospital in the city, and it was a rather sorry one-the Washington Infirmary on Judiciary Square, which had been converted from an old jail in the 1840s. Providence pioneered modern hospital practices at a time when Washington sorely needed them.

Because the modern Providence Hospital is now located in Brookland, it can be easy to forget how important this institution was for the rapidly growing central city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just a few blocks south of the Library of Congress once stood the city’s largest and most prestigious hospital, founded in the urgent, needy days at the dawn of the Civil War.