Four Doctors and Pitt Community Hospital

          It was May 3, 1902. The Greenville newspaper King’s Weekly reported that Dr. Charles O’Hagan Laughinghouse had spoken to the Board of Aldermen on Thursday evening, May 1, about the need for a hospital. In response to the doctor’s appeal, the town board appropriated $1,000 toward the building fund, half of which was to be paid “when the hospital is assured” and the balance a year later. An endowment was also set up to provide $50 a month for maintenance of the hospital when it was established. A committee of the board was to confer with Pitt County commissioners, who took no action, but promised on May 8, 1902, to recommend a special tax to aid in building the hospital and provide $100 a month for its support. Neither the first appropriation for a hospital in
Greenville nor the endowment set up for its operation were ever spent, because no hospital was built at the time.

           Dr. Laughinghouse was born on February 25, 1871. He grew up in Grimesland, attended Trinity School in Chocowinity and Horner’s Military Academy in Oxford, NC, before spending 1888 and 1889 at the University of North Carolina. He graduated in 1893 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and returned to Greenville, where he shared a practice with his grandfather, Dr. C. J. O’Hagan. Like him, he became one of the city’s most notable physicians. He became county coroner in 1894 when he was 23, and a member of the state Board of Medical Examiners in June 1902. From 1909 until 1926, he was the school physician for East Carolina Teachers’ Training School. In 1916-1917, he was president of the North Carolina Medical Society.

          In 1913, Lenoir County Representative E. R. Wooten, probably in response to agitation by Dr. H. O. Hyatt of Kinston, introduced a bill in the General Assembly that authorized county commissioners to levy taxes for the construction and maintenance of public hospitals. The bill was patterned after one that had been passed by the Iowa Legislature in 1909, where the first tax-supported county hospital was opened in 1912.

          Dr. Laughinghouse embraced the new bill because he thought it was more likely to succeed than his earlier attempts. A number of prominent citizens, including US Representative Harry Skinner and former governor Thomas Jordon Jarvis, banded together with a group of doctors to advance a plan to set up a non-profit hospital partially supported by Greenville and Pitt County taxpayers. In May 1913, Dr. Laughinghouse offered the proposal to the Greenville town board, which appropriated funds toward building the hospital. County officials and philanthropists provided other money. During the summer, the NC Secretary of State incorporated Pitt County Hospital, but the project failed because insufficient funds could be raised.

          Again in 1916, Dr. Laughinghouse, by then president of the state medical association, made another serious attempt to implement the 1913 legislation. He telephoned Dr. Karl B. Pace, who had recently graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and was an intern in New York city. Dr. Pace was from Maxton, a small town in Robeson County a few miles east of Laurinburg. Would he be willing to return to North Carolina and help with patients while Laughinghouse campaigned for the hospital? Dr. Pace answered, “Yes.”

          Dr. M. T. Edgerton, Jr., the county health officer, joined the campaign, and the two physicians traveled all over the county between September and December, crusading for a bond issue to support building a hospital. They approached everyone with influence that would listen: other doctors (only seven of whom lived in Greenville), businessmen, teachers, and preachers. In the referendum held on December 5, 1916, the bond issue passed by a sizable majority in Greenville Township, but the citizens of Pitt County outside the town voted against it.
          Dr. Laughinghouse immediately began working to have the 1913 law amended so that townships and municipalities could erect hospitals independently of the counties where they were located. Dr. Hyatt of Kinston joined him, and they successfully lobbied for the amendment, which the 1917 General Assembly passed. Before they could do anything more, World War I began.

          Although he was 46 years old, Laughinghouse volunteered to serve in the Army Medical Corps in May 1917. After organizing the medical profession of North Carolina for service, he was assigned to the officers’ training camp at Fort Oglethorpe, GA, as a major. He was placed in command of Base Hospital No. 85 at Fort Sill, OK, and went to France in August, 1918, as a lieutenant colonel, supervising the hospital’s transfer to Paris, and in the following January to Angers. While he was in France, he launched a hospital fund drive back in Greenville by sending a $1,000 check toward the project.

          Dr. Pace joined the Army Medical Corps in 1917, along with most other Pitt County physicians, leaving the area virtually without doctors until after the war.

          Upon his return home in March 1919, Dr. Laughinghouse resumed his practice. He took up again his crusade for the hospital, but he made little progress. However, in the following year the idea caught on in another quarter.
          A newspaper essay by Ray Smith, second-prize winner in a countywide contest, was published in the February 17 issue of the Greenville Daily News. He responded to the topic: “Why the County of Pitt Should Have a County Hospital.” Smith proclaimed that Greenville was one of the best tobacco markets in the state, and grew some of its finest tobacco. The county not only had some of the best farming land but also had many manufacturing enterprises, tobacco factories, cotton mills, oil and fertilizer mills, flour mills, and lumber plants. It also had a good school system, and people from all parts of the United States, as well as from foreign countries, attended the East Carolina Teachers’ Training School of Greenville. What was lacking was a county hospital, to make it unnecessary for the sick and injured, and poor people who could ill afford to be transported by automobile or train to hospitals in distant cities.

          “Our soldiers went to Europe to cure the political ills of a degenerate civilization—so that they might not be spread over the entire world—and to comfort and assist the weak and wronged nations. So a memorial hospital would be for countless years to come, a constant reminder of a principle, similar to that for which our soldiers fought and died,” Smith wrote.

          Thus began a campaign to construct a hospital that would be a memorial “to those men who died for a suffering world.” It was fitting that “the People, not a few men, are being asked to build it,” as the Greenville Daily News said in an article on March 3, 1920. The roster of 14 directors read like a gazeteer of towns in the county: J. F. Barwick, Ayden; William McArthur, Beaver Dam; C. L. Parker, Belvoir; S. M. Jones, Bethel; S. M. Crisp, Falkland; C. D. Horton, Farmville; R. A. Fountain, Fountain; W. E. Proctor, Chicod; J. E. Winslow, Greenville; J. A. Stokes, Swift Creek; and A. G. Cox, Winterville.

          The goal of the campaign was $250,000 to build the plant and set up a fund for maintenance. The county commissioners would use the money for construction and then pay 6 percent interest a year ($15,000) for maintenance. The hospital would enable Pitt County, in the words of the Daily News, “to follow up the results of her public health work, doing for her boys and girls as much as she is doing for her hogs, sheep, horses, mules, and cattle.” A separate building would house patients with tuberculosis, which had spread following the influenza epidemic of 1918. The new hospital would have an operating room, laboratories, X-ray, and incubators for premature infants.

          The Daily News reported on March 4 that the architect had submitted plans, and on March 5, that $20,150 had already been subscribed to Pitt Memorial Hospital, even before the fund-raising campaign opened. The goal was “a certificate of stock in every home in Pitt County.” Canvassing continued all that week, for “a hospital to be built as a memorial to the soldier boys who paid the great price across the seas.”
In the same issue of the Daily News, another article read as follows: “Jack Boyd, colored, who resides at 205 Ninth Street, so far as is known, has purchased the first share of Pitt County Memorial Stock, of any of his race in the county. The purchase was made through W. C. Staples, salesman. Boyd says that he is going to frame his certificate and hang it on the wall at his home.”

          On Tuesday, March 9, the African-American citizens of Greenville held a meeting in the First Baptist Church in the interest of the campaign, and a similar one two days later in Farmville. The newspaper commented, “The colored are already taking decided interest in the hospital campaign, and they are going to make a good showing when the final count is made.”

          The Daily News said in an editorial on March 11 that the canvassers in Greenville had received subscriptions by Tuesday of $40,000 toward the town’s quota of $125,000. Practically every household was subscribing. The canvassers’ intention was to reach $100,000 in Greenville before tackling the other towns in the county.

          The county commissioners would have to levy a hospital tax to pay the $15,000 a year for the hospital’s maintenance. “Some people have gone into hysterics over an imaginary ghost,” read a newspaper editorial on March 15. “What about the six percent interest that the county commissioners agreed to pay to the Memorial Hospital?” The tax amounted to 25 cents per capita to maintain the hospital building, provide for indigent patients, and furnish ambulance services. How could anyone object to using a small amount of public money for public health purposes?

          On Tuesday, September 7, 1920, the Daily News under the headline, “CITIZEN APPEALS FOR COMMUNITY HOSPITAL IN PITT” ran a contributed article designed to emphasize the urgent need for a community hospital in Pitt County. It noted, “Something like half the amount desired for building and equipping the plant has already been subscribed, and the campaign is now about to be renewed for securing the balance so the work of construction may soon begin.”

          Between 1920 and 1922, it appears nothing was done about building a hospital. There may have been a lack of cooperation from the doctors, since the director of the Pitt County Department of Health in January, 1922, publicly emphasizing the importance of a hospital, said, “it is necessary that all physicians pull together if it is to be as successful in this county as others.”

          On December 20, 1922, the Daily Reflector published an appeal to convert funds raised for the recently abandoned community hospital campaign into a gift for the King’s Daughters to use for destitute sick persons.
In 1923, the Rotary Club took up a new campaign for the same objective that, according to The Daily Reflector, had been established more than twenty years before. The newspaper was very sanguine about the hospital project, saying, “With Rotary behind it, it is a settled fact that we will soon see the dream realized in a large, fully equipped hospital.” But the Rotary appears to have abandoned the effort when Drs. Laughinghouse and Pace went forward with their plans.

          Laughinghouse went to Pace again early that year, and as the latter remembered, said, “Karl, it’s a shame that every county around us has one or two hospitals, and we, the largest county in the eastern part of the state, have none at all.” The two men went to Wilson and discussed the problem with Dr. E. T. Dickerson, a physician and surgeon at the Wilson Sanitarium. The three of them had further talks with Dr. W. I. Wooten, who had attended the University of North Carolina and graduated in 1920 from Jefferson Medical College. Wooten had just moved to Greenville from Fair Bluff and set up practice.

          These four physicians found it unacceptable for their patients who needed hospitalization to have to travel by ambulance over rough roads to Kinston, Washington or Rocky Mount. The most seriously ill had to go by train to hospitals a hundred miles or more away in Norfolk, Richmond, or Raleigh for treatment that could not be obtained in eastern North Carolina.

          In May 1923 they obtained a charter to erect a hospital. Dr. Wooten, chairman of the building committee, advertised for a site in Greenville. Three locations were considered and then rejected for lack of parking space, one on property owned by the Higgs family near the future Guy Smith Stadium, one on property owned by C. Heber Forbes, and another near the old Model School on Reade Street. They settled on the Frank Johnston property in the area called “College View,” on the corner of what became Johnston Street and Woodlawn Avenue.

           Fewer than 20 houses occupied the College View area where land was bought for the site, just east of the old high school on Reade Street and two blocks from East Carolina Teachers College. At the time, the area was right at the edge of town. The road that would become Woodlawn Avenue was little more than a path through a tobacco field, used to haul tobacco to the curing barns. Carl Pierce, whose family moved from Falkland to Greenville in 1928 when he was 10 years old, used to ride his pony down Woodlawn. He remembered that the townspeople used the road to go down to the Tar River to fish, and young couples drove through the farm that was to become Chatham Circle to park overlooking the river.

          When they announced the charter’s approval and completed plans for a building, the promoters said that they “believed that not only every physician in the county would take some stock in this much needed undertaking, but will give it their constant and hearty cooperation and unqualified support.” This statement was overly optimistic. After talking with every physician practicing in the town and county, the group found only a few of them interested in purchasing stock at $100 a share. Drs. C. J. Ellen, G. G. Dixon, C. G. Garrenton, E. B. Beasley, L. C. Skinner, and Joe Smith made nominal purchases. Only 2 percent of the total needed was raised by stock sales. The estimated cost for the building and its equipment was $65,000. In the end, it actually cost $85,000, and the group of four doctors mortgaged their own property, borrowed against their life insurance policies and then purchased more life insurance to provide security for further loans.

          The physicians established a residence for nurses on the northwest corner of Woodlawn Avenue and Third Street. While the hospital was being built, they set up temporary facilities in September on the second floor of the building that housed H. L. Hodges Store at 210 East Fifth Street. The air was permeated with the smell of hardware from the store below, and of a stable next door. There were wards and a limited number of private rooms, as well as “a modern and thoroughly equipped operating room, and every other convenience for the care and comfort of patients that space will permit.” On Friday, September 7, 1923, a public reception was held at the temporary hospital, called by the Greenville Daily Reflector “a unit of the Pitt Community Hospital.” Residents of Pitt and adjoining counties were invited, and local doctors and dentists were urged to attend with their wives, to meet and help welcome visitors. More than 800 people attended the reception.

          The temporary hospital was staffed by the four doctors, by Faye Barnes, bookkeeper, and five nurses, Emma Winfree (later Mrs. J. L. Evans), Vashti Benson (Mrs. Roy Coburn), Maude Bryan (Mrs. Hubert Joyner of Farmville), Lucy Bond, and Katherine Munns. Mattie Gold Mercer (later Mrs. Simon Brooks Tucker), later came to Greenville from the Wilson Sanatorium with four student nurses to work there.

          The new hospital staff’s first night was an exciting one, since they observed the first surgical operation in the new facility. “We all had to see that first operation in Pitt County,” Mrs. Tucker said. “It was an appendicitis operation the very first night we were there.”

          One local resident, James F. Davenport, Jr., recalls a visit in 1924 to his second grade teacher, Christine Johnson, who was recuperating from an appendicitis operation. He was 8 years old at the time. He heard later that in 1924 it had cost $4 a day to stay in the hospital. When the Community Hospital opened on Johnston Street, the rate was $5 a day for each of the 22 private rooms, “all of which had windows for light and ventilation.”

          The Johnston Street facility, a three-story building with 42 beds, 41 for white patients and 1 for black patients, opened on June 1. Dr. E. T. Dickerson was the superintendent and surgeon of the hospital, which had a staff of 16 nurses. Two physicians were in full-time attendance, Dr. Dickerson and Dr. Vernon Ward, who later practiced in Robersonville. Day and night superintendent nurses and a surgical nurse superintendent directed the nursing staff.

          Faye Barnes, Dr. Dickerson’s niece, moved from the temporary hospital when the new one opened, and became the hospital’s business manager. Her plan had been to work for two weeks, until a replacement could be found. She stayed on for 16 years, and was said to have run the hospital. She insisted on payment when services were performed, even if she offended patients by doing so. She helped Jonah Hagan, the hospital’s cook, in the vegetable garden, collected honey from the hospital’s beehives, dispensed supplies, including narcotics, and drove the Cadillac ambulance that was used to transport patients.

          From the beginning, the hospital had a training school for nurses, who lived in the residence at Woodlawn Avenue and Third Street. They had ample practical experience under the direction of head nurse Virginia Ives, and attended daily lectures in all the subjects needed to qualify them to practice in the largest hospitals in the state.
The first officers included the four original doctors: Dr. Dickerson was president of the hospital corporation, Dr. Laughinghouse first vice president, Dr. W. H. Dixon second vice president, Dr. K. B. Pace treasurer, and Dr. W. I. Wooten secretary. Dr. C. C. Garrington of Ayden was a member of the board of directors of the hospital, along with Drs. Dickerson and Pace.

A Hospital for the Colored

          The Daily Reflector reported on August 9, 1924, “not only the Christian people of the town, but everybody has come to realize that a hospital for colored people in Greenville is an immediate and absolute necessity.” The Greenville Kiwanis Club began to campaign that summer for such a hospital, to be financed by monthly donations of $10 to $20 from each of the churches in Greenville. The money was to be paid on the first of each month to the Welfare Officer, who was “to pay over such a part of it from month to month as is necessary to keep the hospital going.” Kiwanian Laughinghouse headed the committee working for the hospital, which began operation on September 1. He reported to the membership on September 5 that the churches in the community had responded favorably to a request that each of their members pay 3 cents to cover the rent and laundry for the hospital.

          The Pitt Community Hospital agreed to donate the use of its sterilizing equipment, operating rooms, x-ray and pathology laboratory to limit expenses. At the request of the Pitt County Medical Society, and in acknowledgement of the major donations by the Kiwanis Club and the community, the supervisor and directors of Community Hospital were in charge of professional services. To obtain enough money to provide for indigent patients at the new hospital, the Kiwanis Club depended upon donations from its members and the public, as well as the African-Americans of Greenville, and most particularly on their churches and lodges, and finally on donations from club members and others.

          Before September, an African-American graduate nurse, Frances Hopkins, with the help of her family, had operated a hospital with two beds in a room in her home at 114 North Washington Street as a unit of Pitt Community Hospital. She had been born in Greenville, and was experienced in hospital administration and management. No surgery was done at her small hospital, but was performed at the Community Hospital, with the patients being taken there in that hospital’s ambulance.

          Nurse Hopkins leased space for the new privately owned hospital, St. Frances Hospital for Colored People. It was located in the renovated Bernard House, near the corner of First and Evans streets, two blocks north of the post office. She also arranged for other adjacent houses to be connected with it if they should be needed.

          Besides leasing the building, she also acted as supervisor of the hospital, and directed a second graduate nurse and a few nurses who were preparing to attend classes at the Community Hospital training school. Any physician in good standing was permitted to practice at St. Frances Hospital. Patients were required to pay in advance by the week. A ward bed, board, and nursing for women and for children under 12 years old was $14 per week. For men and for boys over 12, it was $18. Private rooms for men or women were $21 per week. There was a $5 minimum charge for the operating room and $5 minimum charge for anesthesia.

The Staffing of the Community Hospital

          Several women were integral to the success of the new Pitt Community Hospital. The head nurse or day superintendent nurse was Virginia Ives. There were also an assistant day superintendent and a night superintendent, both graduate nurses. The first group of nurses, who had begun their training before coming to Johnston Street, graduated in March 1924. Maud Bell Bryan of Wilson, who was surgical nurse at the hospital until the fall of 1924, and Emma Winfree of Wadesboro, who became night superintendent, were in the first class. Mattie Mercer Tucker finished her student training in October 1924, and went to Raleigh to take and pass the nursing exams. The nurses’ training school offered lectures on anatomy, physiology, chemistry, pharmacy, routine nursing, surgical nursing, obstetrical nursing, dietetics, and record keeping. The average class had 15-20 students. Many of them remained in Greenville to work after graduation. The school continued in operation until 1932.

          Dr. Dickerson became ill from overwork a few months after the Community Hospital opened, and was replaced by Dr. Malcomb Thompson, who came from a residency in Philadelphia to practice as a surgeon and serve as superintendent. Dr. Dickerson eventually returned to his practice but did not resume the position of superintendent, leaving Dr. Thompson in that position. Dr. Thompson remained until 1929, when he resigned and was replaced by Dr. J. L. Winstead, a graduate of UNC’s two-year medical school who had received his medical degree in 1925 from the University of Maryland medical school in Baltimore.

          In 1926, Dr. Sellers Mark Crisp, who had served as an intern under Dr. Dickerson’s direction, joined Dr. Pace in his practice and became a member of the hospital staff and of its board of directors. Dr. Crisp had attended the two-year UNC medical school after serving in the Army in France, and received his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued to practice in Greenville until his death on July 29, 1955.

          In October 1926, Dr. Laughinghouse left Greenville to go to Raleigh as state health officer. He filled that position until August 26, 1930, when he died in a High Point hospital from a blood clot that had traveled to his heart from a varicose vein in his leg. His death stunned his doctors and his family, since he appeared to be recovering from an attack of phlebitis brought on by a long hike in the mountains near Montreat, N.C. His body arrived in Greenville on August 27 for a wake at the home of his daughter, Mrs. R. C. Stokes, Jr. His funeral was held at Jarvis Memorial Methodist church on Thursday, August 28, and he was buried in Cherry Hill Cemetery.

Expanding the Community Hospital

          In 1930, the hospital directors added a specialist in the care of infants and children, Dr. T. M. Watson, a boyhood friend of Dr. Pace who had been practicing in Wilmington for several years. He arrived in the spring of 1930. His practice flourished so that in 1933-34 a children’s ward—the Watson ward—was added to the hospital. Beneath the new ward, a dining room and kitchen brought the cost of the entire construction to $30,000. The old dining room and kitchen wings were converted into two six-bed wards.
          After the new dining room was finished in 1934, the directors had recognized that a single bed for African-American patients was insufficient, and renovated the basement, converting it into a ward for 12 to 15 African-Americans.

          Beginning in 1935, two new wings were added to the east end of the hospital, for an additional 14 rooms and two wards, increasing bed capacity to 50 patients. There was space for X-ray and laboratory equipment, and a sun parlor was to be built on the second floor over the addition. As part of the same building project, the ambulance entrance was moved from the back of the building to the Woodlawn Avenue entrance. These additions cost $25,000.

          During that same year, Dr. D. B. Armistead was invited from his practice at a hospital in Richmond to join the medical staff. Dr. Fred Haar, who had come to Greenville as an associate of the pediatrician, Dr. Watson, began to actively support the hospital, where it appears he had courtesy staff privileges but did not become a member of the hospital administration.

          During the depression in the early thirties, the hospital did poorly financially, and for a period between 1930 and 1935 operated at a loss. Sometimes only one or two of the 17 to 18 ward patients paid anything for professional services or medicine. In spite of all efforts to have someone take responsibility for room, board, and nursing costs, the hospital from time to time absorbed the $2 per day fee. Only keeping expenses as low as possible could the hospital administration bring income and expenditures into balance.

          In September 1935, the hospital was split into two divisions in order to qualify for Duke Endowment funds for charity patients. One division, still called Pitt Community Hospital, was the professional division, operating a clinic and taking charge of the medical and surgical patients. The other division, Pitt General Hospital, was a non-profit organization with Judge F. M. Wooten as president, R. J. Slay vice president, and R. C. Stokes, Jr., secretary-treasurer. It leased the building and furniture from Community Hospital, provided nursing, and operated as a general hospital. The Duke Endowment provided $1 per day for each charity patient, to be supplemented by local funds. Patients able to pay were charged at the regular rate. Members of the Pitt County Medical Society continued to be on the courtesy staff, maintaining the privilege of treating their own private patients in the hospital.

          By 1939, it was becoming clear that the hospital, even with additional wards, could no longer accommodate Pitt County’s needs for hospital-centered healthcare. The board of directors hired an architect to draw plans for a 40-bed addition to the hospital. Since 1935, the hospital had become solvent again, and even accrued some money for renovations. Nevertheless, the directors abandoned the expansion proposal to look for other solutions.

The Service League

          On January 9, 1939, Dr. T. M Watson spoke to the Greenville Service League about the opportunity to provide for the hospitalization of patients at the hospital. He told them that the average hospitalization for an adult was for about 12 days and for a child about 5 days. Providing for one bed space would benefit many persons each year. The League voted unanimously to support one bed for a worthy person “man, woman, or child, white or colored” who was not on charity, but could not afford hospitalization. A bed committee was appointed consisting of Mrs. R. M. Garrett, Chairman, Miss Bessie Brown, and Mrs. T. A. Smoot, Jr., to choose the patients who would use the bed.

          In this way, a fruitful and permanent relationship began between Pitt Community Hospital and the Greenville Service League.

          In March 1940, some of the members of the league were making scrapbooks for children who stayed in hospital wards. In addition, in March, the women solicited donations of warm clothing for the Thrift Shop over the Guaranty Bank on Dickinson Avenue. Mrs. Garrett received letters from many local doctors, commending the League for supplying hospital space for many people who otherwise would not have been able to afford it.

           The Service League held a dance early in April 1940 to raise additional money to provide the bed, which had been named the Laughinghouse Hospital Bed the year before to honor Mrs. R. C. Stokes, Jr., Dr. Charles Laughinghouse’s daughter and the League’s first president. The dance became an annual event.

          The shortcomings of the Community-General Hospital multiplied as Greenville and Pitt County grew, and there were many discussions about appropriate remedies. The facilities were no longer adequate. Community businessmen discussed expanding the hospital, and also spoke to medical leaders from various parts of the state about the idea of a new hospital. In 1939, the different proposals had been consolidated into a plan to add 40 beds to Pitt General. Rumors about the possibility of federal legislation to make funds available to build county hospitals led to the abandonment of the plan in favor of the possibility of building an entirely new one.

          The board of trustees of Pitt General decided in 1940 to buy the hospital from its stockholders. They used as a down payment funds that had been set aside for renovation, and issued notes for the balance, to be paid annually. They bought the plant for far less than its original cost of $85,000. At first the notes were paid as they came due, but when operating costs doubled, the struggling hospital began to default. The final debt was not paid until 1951, when the county commissioners purchased the building and grounds from the board of trustees for $35,000, the amount of the debt remaining unpaid, in order to ensure that Pitt General would close when the county’s new hospital opened.

           The old hospital continued to receive patients until the county bought it, and the building was then converted into office space. It was being repaired at a cost of about $8,000 in November 1951, readying it for occupancy in January of the following year. A variety of county and federal services were housed in the building.
The building was finally sold at auction in 1980, and for several months afterward stood as a deserted, boarded-up relic. In May, 1981, it was bulldozed to make room for an apartment building. When it was sold, the value of the hospital with its equipment and grounds was estimated to be between $200,000 and $250,000.

Campaign for a New Hospital

          Dreams of a new hospital remained unrealized for several years.
          Early in 1946, District Highway Commissioner John G. Clark, Sr., the Sinclair Oil distributor in Greenville, returned from a business trip with an idea buzzing in his head about how to secure a hospital for the city and county. Clark was chairman of the Democratic Party of Pitt County from 1943-1961, and was very active in community affairs. He was uniquely placed to make his idea into a reality.

          Clark had learned from a member of the North Carolina Medical Care Commission that the Hill-Burton Act Congress was debating would provide funds for hospital construction, if passed. When he came back to Greenville, he discussed a county-owned hospital with officials of the Chamber of Commerce, who appointed a committee to talk with Pitt General Hospital trustees. They also talked with state officials, who estimated that a hospital would cost approximately $5,000 per bed, fully equipped. The cost had risen to about $12,000 a bed by the time actual plans were made.

          Later in the year, Clark invited interested people from all sections of the county to a meeting at East Carolina Teachers College to consider the question of a county hospital and find out how the people of the county felt about it. With Clark presiding, the group discussed how to raise the county’s share of the money. The consensus was that the most practical approach to funding would be through a bond issue. A major setback occurred when the Hill-Burton Act failed at first to become law, but the planners decided that they should persist in the project.

          Clark and C. Stuart Carr, Jr., chairman of the Pitt General Hospital Board of Trustees, led a group of people in selling their concept in every precinct of the county. The task was far from simple. A special bond election would require a special registration, and under the statutes governing such elections all the registered voters who did not vote in the election would be counted as opposing the bond issue. It was necessary to raise interest and persuade people to register if they were in favor of the hospital, not to register if they did not intend to vote for it, and also to get them to the polls to vote if they were for the bond issue.

          Through July and August of 1946, Clark and Carr traveled hundreds of miles through county communities. They gave speeches to church organizations, civic clubs, women’s groups and talked in country stores and filling stations to anyone they could find around the cracker barrels there. They had a good case to present. Pitt County seriously needed modern medical facilities, and the other counties around were mostly years ahead of it in hospital space.

          In the spring of 1947, the sponsors of the hospital circulated a petition asking the county commissioners to call an election on a special bond issue to cover the county’s share of construction. Many citizens from all parts of the county signed the petition, and the commissioners authorized a referendum to be voted on in September, 1947. By then, hospital cost estimates had risen to about $6,000 per bed, and the goal had become a 140-bed hospital.

          In the summer of 1947, the state Medical Care Commission held its quarterly meeting in Greenville and approved a number of local hospitals, including a 100-bed facility for Pitt County. Pitt County Commissioners met on Monday, July 7, and voted to call a special election on September 16, 1947 for a vote on a bond issue of $351,900 as the county’s 39.1 percent share of the $900,000 estimated for financing a new 140-bed hospital. The commissioners expected the Surgeon General’s office to provide 33.33 percent of the financing, or $300,000, and the state to pay $248,000—27.6 percent—out of state funds voted at the previous session of the General Assembly.

          On September 16, 1947, the county’s citizens approved a bond issue of $452,000 for building a new hospital. It was to be named Pitt Memorial Hospital in honor of Pitt County men who had died in the two World Wars. As the trustees investigated costs for hospital construction during the next few months, they recognized that the money for the hospital would not be adequate. On March 8, 1948, the Executive Committee of the hospital board of trustees reported to the county commissioners that there was a $118,000 shortfall for a 100-bed hospital. The cost would be $1.2 million. The commissioners agreed to assume responsibility for $468,000, 39.1 percent of the total.

          With hospital construction plans under way, C. D. Ward, the former head of Pitt General Hospital, was appointed as the first administrator of the still-to-be-built Pitt Memorial.

          The heirs of Jesse Rountree Moye donated 17.5 acres of farm land on the Greenville-Falkland highway (now West Fifth Street). Architect George Watts Carr of Durham was engaged to draw up plans for the proposed hospital. In April, Carr submitted preliminary plans to the board of trustees. The prospects were favorable for state and federal funding in 1948, so Carr was instructed to prepare final plans for the building. During the week of October 6, borings were made on the site chosen for the hospital building. The architect found the soil so unsteady that he advised placing pilings to secure the foundations on the first solid rock, 45-50 feet below the surface, to avoid shifting and cracking.

          On November 29, bids were advertised for a 120-bed hospital to cost $1.4 million. Of this sum, $877,000 would come from the state and federal governments and the balance from the county. The county let contracts in January for constructing and equipping the hospital.

The First Pitt Memorial Hospital

          The hospital was completed in 1951. On January 18, about 500 citizens heard former Army Secretary Kenneth C. Royall, a practicing attorney in New York city, pay tribute to Pitt County citizens for building Pitt Memorial Hospital.

          Many of the people attending the inaugural open house then toured the hospital to admire its state-of-the-art features. These included a surgical suite with two major and two minor operating rooms and air conditioning. There was an emergency service area with a waiting room, an examining room, and a treatment room; a ward for short-term care of mentally-ill patients; a closed ward for isolating patients with contagious illnesses; the latest in Burroughs electrical adding machines for bookkeeping; comfortable lounges for staff members; and an autopsy room. It had segregated wards with 30 of its 120 beds reserved for black patients. At the hospital’s opening, a patient could have a private room with a bath for only $11 a day. The kitchen, shining with stainless steel pots and pans, was equipped with a machine that would produce 1800 pounds of flaked ice each morning. There was an internal telephone system connecting nurses’ stations, the emergency room, offices, and other working areas. There were 38 physicians on the medical staff, 50 nurses, and 75 support staff members.

          On February 8, 1951, at 8:45 a.m., the first two patients, a Winterville woman, Mamie McLawhorn Dews, and her week-old son, Kenneth Kirwin Dews, Jr., arrived on the third floor maternity ward of the new Pitt County Memorial Hospital from Pitt General. They had been chosen by drawing names from a hat. The infant boy’s father was subsequently elected several times to the Pitt County Board of Commissioners, served on the hospital Board of Trustees, and was a notable supporter of PCMH for many years.

          At 11:39 a.m., Lillie Bell Wilson of Havelock, who had been admitted at 10:50, delivered the first baby in the new hospital—a girl who had not yet been named. Almost all of the patients were settled in their rooms by 5:00 p. m. The hospital kitchen prepared the dinner meal, and it was served to everyone who had been moved into the new hospital.

          The hospital dreamt of by Dr. Charles Laughinghouse in 1902 had taken half of the century to become a reality such as he could never have foreseen.

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