Part II: MOUNT HOPE HOSPITAL

In 1915  J.K. Millikin purchased an old mansion, the Nathaniel Wheeler house in North Dighton, to renovate it into a 15 bed hospital  which included an operating room.  It was located where later the bank would be across String St. from Johnny's Market/Joe's Pharmacy -
on the same side as the Post Office.

   It was staffed by two nurses, two assistants, and a doctor on call.

The hospital would have been a boon to the employees and their families as, for one thing, a growing population of women preferred hospitals as the place to give birth rather than at home.  In 1931 there were 708,889 births in U.S. hospitals, in 1942 there were 1,670,599.  We know that the delivery room at Mount Hope must have been a busy one.  The hospital was equipped to handle the deliveries and everyday work injuries and sicknesses.  Complicated cases were sent to Taunton or Fall River.  The very complicated to Boston on Rhode Island.


                                                       
                                                               Mount Hope Hospital in 1927
                                   

The hospital was primarily for the employees and their families, but

if special permission was sought from J.K others could be admitted.

Should an employee or his family need specialized care in Boston,

the company was known to provide for that.  At times, J.K. even 

went to Boston to visit the patient.

I found the above photo of an old type of hospital ward in my Pinterest file, it probably was what hospitals in the late 20's looked like.....note the metal beds.  When I was a nursing student in the 60's the hospital where I trained still had two large wards of 16 beds each, one for men and one for women.

A pithy tale is told by Arlene Gouveia: if a patient was very ill, straw or hay was strewn on the streets
outside so that the patient would not be disturbed by the sounds of horses hooves.....  Something that could only happen back in those days, today's hospital noises are impossible.

                                    This is a photo of a delivery room in the early 1900's....

The staffing at Mt. Hope Hospital signifies that the nurses there must have been very busy and also given a lot of responsibility.  One of them visited the Plant each day and would have handled many work related health or injury problems.  The photo from Pinterest is an example of nurses
caring for company employees.

       

Keep in mind  the following timeline:

*Only in 1921 was the Band-Aid introduced by Johnson and Johnson.

*In 1925, the cost of sickness per capita was $10 a year and $12 for loss of related employment wages.

*In 1928, Vitamin D was identified along with its role in rickets .

*Penicillin was discovered in 1928.  1929 saw the first group insurance plan formulated in Texas.

*The Iron Lung was invented in 1928.

So there were not a lot of remedies to chose from....

Black Thursday on Wall Street was in 1929 which plunged the country into deep depression.

Still the Mount Hope Hospital carried on until 1950 or 1951 when the company relocated.

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

Next Post:  Why the Mount Hope Finishing Company left N. Dighton and the state.

  ..................................

Resources for this post

Photographs of Nurses Source : Pinterest: Vintage Nurses, Vintage hospitals.

 Source of Mt. Hospital photos: I'm From Taunton Facebook Page as previously cited.  Thank you to Carol O'Connell Soares for her help with dates for Mt. Hope Hospital as well as photos of the hospital.

                                                      Source of Statistics and Timeline:
http://www.hhnmag.com/hhnmag/jsp/articledisplay.jsp?dcrpath=HHNMAG/Article/data/01JAN2007/0701HHN_FEA_80_Anniv&domain=HHNMAG

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