MOUNT HOPE HOSPITAL: A HOSPITAL WITHIN A DREAM : PART I : THE COMPANY

 Historians are wanderers by nature and necessity.  Threads of history flutter from each discovery they make, often they are nudged to take a thread and follow it.  Such is the history of Mount Hope Hospital in N. Dighton, a memory waiting to be enjoyed once again.  It cannot be enjoyed in isolation, however.  It must be studied within the larger context of the Mount Hope Finishing Company experience.  This first post is an introduction, followed in the next by a discussion of the Mount Hope Hospital and lastly, by the final history of The Company.

Small towns lie contiguous to the City of Taunton, and it is sometimes hard to see where one leaves off and another begins.  Taunton itself weaves in and out of some of them: a sign tells you you are leaving and a bit up the road another tells you that you are coming back in.

Dighton is one of those towns, particularly North Dighton.  I grew up in Taunton and never knew about the history of N. Dighton, including its hospital.  I began to notice on the I'm From Taunton Facebook page the number of folks who were born there in the 40's and early 50's.  So I went a-hunting and discovered a fascinating tale within a tale!

From 1901 to 1951 North Dighton was the home of the Mount Hope Finishing Company touted as one of the largest cotton plants in the world!  I will not be able to do justice to the Mount Hope/ N. Dighton story here.  But, I plan to do more reading on the subject as I hope you will as well. Perhaps this will whet your appetite as it has mine.  Although I started with researching the hospital, the rest of it captured my interest and thus, these posts.

                    The name Mount Hope came from the Native American Rhode Island village, 

    Montaup, where Wampanoag chief King Phillip was killed in 1676 (King Phillips war

 was in Colonial southeastern New England)

                           The Mt. Hope Co. published a newsletter, here is one of its 1924  covers
                                      with a good aerial view of the Company campus.


I will get to the hospital in the next post  but first I want to write about the "company town," a phenomena of that era.  Come along with me.  As always I welcome addendum's or corrections, this is far from the scholarly endeavor that I wish it could be.

Much of the next paragraphs and photos are from the web site below about the Mount Hope story. The blog post article is by Eric Schultz.  I am grateful to Mr. Schultz, and to Mryna Santos from the Dighton Historical Society for forwarding it to me.  Also, to Karen from Dighton.com
                                                      The post has excellent photographs.

     http://theoccasionalceo.blogspot.com                         

In 1901, the story begins. Joseph Knowles and his nephew Joseph Knowles Millikin, who was 26 years of age, known to his associates as J.K.happened by an abandoned mlll in the tiny town of N. Dighton, MA.  They immediately saw its potential. The mill soon represented prominent investors: the Hathaways, Stantons, Tiffanys and Crapos.  Eventually Joseph Millikin would be top shareholder due to his phenomenal success.

Within 6 short months, they had established a cloth finishing company to support the booming textile trade in nearby Fall River, New Bedford, and Rhode Island. J.K procured rights to copious water needed, then sought the necessary labor....and therein lies his fame.

                                                    J.K. Millikin on the 1945 cover of
                                                          the company newsletter
                                               Apparently, he led a quiet and simple life.
                                                                  ................

To find and keep good labor in this area of New England, J.K. adopted the Company Town
model.  In the days when there were few cars and no highway system, it helped to centralize housing close to the site of work.  This was not new to the U.S., coal mining companies and others had adopted it.  Perhaps, none as pervasively as J.K.however.  In 1901, there was only one macadam road in N. Dighton. This soon changed.  Eventually, the company created a beautiful park where it hosted employee picnics, sponsored ski trips by train to New Hampshire, created a hospital where a nurse would visit the Plant daily, created the town's water system (some of which is still is use today), a dairy (still historically intact today as well).  If you lived there, as an employee, you were provided with paved roads, had your own police department and fire station.  The farm, though it has changed hands often throughout the year/s remains intact to this day with its current owners, the Reed Family Limited Partnership. Milk and vegetables were sold at cost to employees. There were men from the Village employed at the company, too. The company paid for church buildings, a library, card rooms, dances as well as theatre performances Emergency services were provided and employees never had to shovel.

"Shortly after obtaining the old mill, J.K. bought 13 old tenement buildings and completely remodeled them inside and out. Each was decorated and outfitted with new plumbing.  The Company continued to acquire, build and rent nearly 200 homes, many small bungalows and single family distinctive homes.  Each had its inviting entrance, a well kept lawn, a little garden, was located to best advantage along the roads of the model village.  The Company mowed lawns, trimmed trees, raked leaves and cleared snow for its tenants.  All houses were repainted and repapered every three years.  Rents ranged from $1.25 per week to $5.00 per week (on average salaries tended to exceed those of Fall River).  The newest houses, circa 1922, included steam heat, hot and cold water, baths, set tubes, hardwood floors, electric lights, gas, sanitary closets and sewer connections."

                                                                Eric Schultz internet article

                                          NEXT POST; MOUNT HOPE HOSPITAL




Research for these posts about the Mount Hope experience led me to many sources.  If you would like to further dig into the subject, here are some of them.  Many contributed directly to these posts.

                      Sources for posts on The Mount Hope Finishing Company and Hospital

And More...

...................


http://www.tauntongazette.com/news/x794475604/A-piece-of-history-Mount-Hope-Finishing-Co-remembered-in-Dighton

http://www.tauntongazette.com/news/x598682608/Historic-mill-comes-down

*http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/boyd.company.town

*http://www.dighton.com  see Dighton Historical Society therein.

*Thanks to I'm from Taunton Facebook member Carolyn O'Connor Soares
 for photos of

the Old Mount Hope Hospital in the next post.

*Thanks to Arlene Gouveia once again for her knowledge
 of Mt. Hope Finishing Company.

 * For a fascinating look at the booming textile period in Fall River, 

visit the Fall River Historical Society

  (there is much more there than just Lizzie Borden material).

two books: perhaps easier to obtain from inter-library loan:
Harriet O'Brien's "From Grey to Beauty"

  and "A Fierce Personal Pride" by Burke Davis 

If you had to go to a Hospital: Part I

This is a lovely photograph of the original Morton Hospital around 1910.  It was posted on the Litchfield Historical Society website, believe it or not.  Possibly,

 because Marcus Morton went to the Litchfield Law School.

When it became our hospital in the 40's and 50's , there was much of that wonderful building left

with its sheen of elegance.  In 1960, the mansion was demolished for renovation
and later the Thayer Medical Building project also altered its appearance.

The mansion had been donated by Susan Kimball Morton, daughter of Marcus Morton, an illustrious figure, not just in Taunton but in the state of Massachusetts and beyond in the 1800's.  Marcus Morton could trace his roots back to the Mayflower on his mother's side:
 he was born in Freetown,MA

in 1784. He was homeschooled and later was accepted to Brown University
and then on to the Litchfield School of Law in Massachusetts.  He practiced law
in Taunton before going to to his long and illustrious political career.  As well as the positions below his photo, he was elected to the 15th and 16th congresses as a Republican and then later was a Democrat.  He was Lt. Gov of Massachusetts from 1840-1841 and 1843 to 1844.  In his judicial career he was known for a famous case.  He was the lone dissenter the last time
anyone in the U.S. was convicted of blasphemy.

Marcus Morton was the only governor to ever come from Taunton, MA.

He married Charlotte Hodges and they had 12 children, ten of which survived. His son, Marcus would become a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice as well, following in his father's footsteps.

One of ten remaining children at her father's death, Susan Morton Kimball attained the rights of all of the other children and the family mansion on Washington St. was donated for the first

hospital in Taunton, MA.  The dedication took place Jan. 3, 1889. (Old Colony Historical Society)

First incorporated as The Taunton Hospital Corporation in June of 1888, its name was

later changed to The Morton Hospital.  

In the 20th century, Morton Hospital had its own School of Nursing, a three year program.

I do not recall, but perhaps there was a photograph of Marcus Morton hanging in the

lovely foyer of the old hospital we knew.  Times have so changed and in the recent past, the hospital has been acquired by a for-profit hospital chain and is 

now Morton Hospital- a Steward Hospital.

A friend told me this morning that those amazing historical pictures of the hospital that 

line the corridors  when are going to all be removed. 

If that is true, there go the last vestiges of

the history of Taunton's first hospital.

But,  as we knew it it was an elegant, quiet hospital next door to a primary parochial school where children's laughter could be heard to cheer patients as they recovered.  I always remember the front entrance, the black and white tiles floors, the beautiful  spiral staircase, the fireplace in the waiting area, the switchboard operator who gave you one of two visitors permits 

(you often sneaked in otherwise).

I was never a patient there, but my parents were in those years, though not often. 

 We never frequented the E.R. when we were young, either.

For further interesting reading try

http://www.tauntongazette.com/newsnow/x1644227223/

Ted-Gay-It-will-always-be-Morton-Hospital-to-me

VILLAGE HEALTHY PART II

Often the old Cod Liver Oil was enough to keep us healthy (ugh...remember that taste!).  There was no rush for an antibiotic shot (hence little over abuse), nor a rush to the E.R.  First of all a lot of the living that we did as children was based on a whole lot of exercise, morning to evening when we could get away with it,.  A nice day?  Out we went.
And we stayed out, unless it rained really hard.

Also, we enjoyed  a nutritious and sensible pattern of eating.  We ate slowly, at the family table.  That offered a sharing time as well as a more leisurely rhythm of eating, good for our digestion.  Thank the Lord, the days of cell phones dividing us was way in the future.  We said, "May I be excused, when we were ready to get up and leave" or we waited for everyone to finish.  We picked up dirty dishes and cleaned the kitchen with our Mom.  There were no TV's in the kitchen.

We ate lots and lots of fresh vegetables and meat that had next to nothing added to it, it might even have come from our own henhouse or a neighbor's farm.  We ate Mom's home cooked desserts, again with just enough sugar.  The pantry was full of basic stock and not bags and bags of candies (Halloween stash often lasted a whole long time). Mom canned and froze a lot of food 

so we had the good stuff all year round.

If we got sick, well, most of the time Mom handled that or if it came to it the family doc came to the house or we went to his very simple office, often staffed by only the doc.

We survived and we did not sue anyone....!  We learned to deal with life without medication..imagine that.  We had failure, success, and responsibility and we learned from it all.  We even survived without seat belts....and mercury fillings.  Remember those dentist chairs and the dentist who did everything? We never heard of a hygienist.

  What a different day!  All the squabble politically today, all the constant bombardment of ads for medications everywhere we look (and nothing is sacred either).  The information overload of things that could be wrong with us if we do not do such and such gets bigger each day .  It is relaxing just to look back on a simpler life and breathe!  I am, of course, all for educating ourselves on how to keep healthy, or even better, to control our own health care.  But, today everything has gone overboard in a miasma of profit and greed, and often just by the ever increasing "nanny-state".

Of course, one had all the childhood diseases, that was shared sibling to sibling and kid to kid.
It was a given.  The motto was "get it over when you are young."  A truism there.

Sometimes what was wrong was indeed wrong, even then.
 I just about recall the bright red quarantine signs on doors warning that everyone must keep out.  That meant diphtheria or scarlet fever usually. A gentleman on the web recalls when he caught scarlet fever.  He writes that the teacher asked him to clean out the desk of a student who was out with it, he then contracted it. His teacher did not touch anything and was not infected.  It meant a long confinement and isolation at home for the student, though.

Happily, those diseases are rarely seen today.

                                                           All photos from Pinterest

The worst conditions my sister and I got were terrible cases of poison ivy which our beloved family doc, Dr. Elias, gave us a shot for if it got really bad, which it often did. I think the shots were Prednisone. The next blog posts will be all about our family doc and others who helped us heal when we were young in the Village, and in Taunton.  Stay tuned, there are lots more.  As a matter of fact, when I started this series I did not have much. Then a lot serendipidously came to light and I hope you enjoy it all as much as I do writing it.

Obviously, hoping you will all chime in and make it even more interesting.  If you have looked at the statistics of page views on this blog:  over 20,500!  From all over the world.