History of St. Ann’s Hospital
La Crosse, Wisconsin
1912 – 2001
Virginia Marcotte Larkin
SFSN class of 1951
It has been forty-one years
since St. Francis School of Nursing (SFSN) students
practiced caring for mothers and newborns in St. Ann’s
Maternity Hospital. Students in the SFSN three-year
hospital diploma program were trained in the art of
maternity care in what was once the finest obstetrical
(OB) hospital in La Crosse. (When the OB unit of St. Ann’s
closed in 1963, students fulfilled their requirements on
the new fourth OB floor of St. Francis Hospital.)
Students
gained more than maternity ward experience in St. Ann’s.
Since it’s beginning the facility has been adapted to
other uses to fit the changing needs of the Franciscan
health care mission.
Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA)
established the first maternity hospital in the area in
1912. The sisters remodeled St. Ann’s Orphan Home for
Girls, which they had built on Market Street in 1889, and
reopened it as St. Ann’s obstetrical hospital.
(A Century of Health Care Ministry, 1883-1983, Sister
Regina Lang FSPA) This may have been one of the
earliest hospitals in Wisconsin solely for maternity
care. Wisconsin State Historical Society records list
only one other, Milwaukee Maternity and Free Dispensary,
dating to 1906. The original St. Ann’s Maternity Home was
razed in 1966. Nurses of St. Francis School of Nursing
might remember the structure as Alverno Hall. The new St.
Ann’s Maternity Hospital opened in 1927. Hospital
delivery records list the first birth in the new facility
on October 3, 1927 - an 8 lb. 12 oz. boy, son of a
Houston, Minnesota couple.
From the start the obstetrical business was brisk in the
new hospital with 533 births in the first three months.
Yearly numbers gradually declined, however, as the
economic impact of the Great Depression years affected the
area. Lack of funds for an inpatient hospital birth was a
major factor in the decline. Often doctors made house
calls for home deliveries for mothers who had previously
delivered in a hospital setting. Less than 400 births for
each of the years 1933 and 1934 are recorded for St.
Ann’s.
Toward the end of the nineteen thirties, army units
arrived daily for training at Camp McCoy, a rapidly
expanding military base outside of Sparta, Wisconsin. In
1940, 65,000 soldiers from seven states were stationed at
Camp McCoy. This was the largest troop concentration in
the Midwest since World War I.
(Fort McCoy
publication, Serving America’s Army Since 1909,
McCoy Headquarters) Where it once might have been
unusual to see many soldiers in the region, military men
in khaki uniforms soon were a familiar sight in towns
surrounding the camp. Many soldiers’ wives came to
Wisconsin to be with their husbands before they were sent
overseas. Because the camp did not furnish accommodations
for civilians, the women found housing in area
communities. Some of the women delivered babies in La
Crosse area hospitals. Births at St. Ann’s had increased
each year. Between 1941 and 1945, 4,995 babies were born
in St. Ann’s.
(St. Ann’s birth records)
A real surge in births came at the end of World War II
after the fighting men returned home to their hopes and
dreams, expressed in the poignant wartime ballad, “I’ll Be
Seeing You”
(Irving Kahol/Sammy Fain). Yearly birth rates
swelled until they were counted in the thousands.
“Baby-boom,” a new popular expression, described the
explosion of new births during the post World War II
years. During one month, July 1946, St. Ann’s recorded
175 deliveries. The year 1950 topped all yearly census
counts with a total of 1,952 births. St. Francis School
of Nursing instructors found the high birthrate an
advantage for their students who then could easily attain
the required experience during rotations in delivery
rooms, newborn nurseries and with post-partum mothers.
The OB wings were full.
The overcrowding challenged nursing-care skills. St.
Ann’s ample linen closets and south corridor sun porches
were pressed into use as temporary patient rooms. Large
private corner rooms were turned into two or four-bed
wards with the nursery infants and new mothers on the
third and fourth floors, and labor and delivery room
patients on fifth. Good bedside nursing was necessary to
keep them healthy and comfortable, especially during the
hot, sultry days of summer in the non-air conditioned
facility.
Physicians’ orders of the time kept new mothers in bed ten
days or longer. Early ambulation was not a practice then
to prevent a pulmonary embolism in post-partum mothers,
particularly those women with huge varicosities. Today
it’s difficult to think of the bed-ridden women lying on
the large, heavy rubber sheets used to protect mattresses
on postpartum beds. Though covered with cotton draw
sheets, the rubber wrinkled and was hot. It was a common
sight during their eight-hour duty shifts to see nurses
and aides, working in twos, changing a mother’s position
often and pulling taut the rubber and draw sheets in an
attempt to relieve the hot discomfort of the woman’s
clammy back. In the 1950s, medical practice changed
slowly to allow mothers to be up earlier and therefore to
be discharged from the hospital sooner. Fewer OB beds
were necessary. By 1963, St. Ann’s maternity department
closed. The last baby to be delivered at St. Ann’s was a
girl, born at 4:37 a.m., January 29, 1963. The same
morning of January 29, 1963, a boy was delivered by
caesarean section at 8:27 a.m. on the new maternity 4th
floor of St. Francis Hospital. A girl, born at 11:13
a.m., was the first vaginal birth in the new delivery
room. Data indicates there were 39, 885 births at St.
Ann’s in its thirty-six years as an obstetrical hospital.
Not all were live births.
While it was best known as a maternity hospital before
1963, St. Ann’s housed many other health services during
years of steady occupancy. Even early on, OB service was
maintained on top floors, while the lower floors were put
to use for other health services. By 1927, the St.
Francis Hospital School, which opened in 1902, was
outgrowing its residence in the former Bishop Michael
Heiss home on 11th and Ferry Streets. When St.
Ann’s was built, the nursing school facilities were among
the first to be moved into the newly opened hospital.
School offices, classrooms, laboratories and some nurse
sleeping rooms were located there. Eventually, in 1942,
student nurse arrangements moved into the new St. Francis
School of Nursing built at 615 South 10th
Street. (La
Crosse Tribune and Leader Press, January 1,
1928, Robert C. Yost, reporter)
For a time St. Ann’s contained medical offices,
waiting rooms and demonstration rooms. Mae Swan RN, a St.
Frances graduate of 1926, introduced a weekly, well-baby
clinic to the community in 1927, located at St. Ann’s.
Educational and clinical experience for student nurses
continued as new Franciscan medical programs were
developed at St. Ann’s. In 1949, a post-polio
rehabilitation department was opened on first floor. In
the basement, two physical therapists, Esther Robertson
and Alvina Kuehlthau, staffed a physical therapy
department. Years later, Doctor Norman Sheely conducted a
special pain rehabilitation center in the building.
Sister Yvonne Jenn FSPA opened an unwed mother’s home in
St. Ann’s in 1939. Today the home, named after St.
Gerard, Protector of Mothers, still cares for these women
in a separate facility.
FSPA Sisters, Joyce Bantle (SFSN-1943) and Aletta Burger,
initiated an alcohol rehabilitation program in 1956. Amid
further expansion of alcohol and chemical dependency
programs, sites for treatment changed as needed within the
Franciscan facilities.
(Sister
Joyce Bantle, conversation, June 2003)
At one time,
1st North had a dermatology department.
Patients lay wrapped in medicated body packs, a treatment
indicated in the 1950s. Frequently rooms in the building
were used by personnel for sleeping – some RNs, sometimes
Sisters, and often anesthesiology students on call. In
the basement, Sister Geralda Lechman FSPA directed a large
sewing room. Later that became an activity room and
Chapel of St. Francis Nursing Home.
A pedestrian bridge built across Market Street in 1912
connected the hospitals on each side and facilitated the
expansion of services. The floors in St. Ann’s became
identified as 1st, 2nd, 3rd,
etc. North Wing Departments of St. Francis. Gynecology
patients were located on 2nd North and general
medical sick patients occupied 2nd North West.
Later two new skywalks replaced the 1912 bridge.
When the 10th street wing of St. Francis
Hospital was demolished in 1960, some remodeling at St.
Ann’s accommodated the displaced patients. Also at that
time, the medical library and morgue equipment moved
temporarily to the basement of St. Ann’s. In 1963, a
tunnel was built to connect St. Francis to St. Ann’s at
the sub-basement level. No longer were the large green
oxygen (O2)
tanks needed as O2
was then piped directly through lines into patient rooms
of both hospitals.
(La
Crosse Tribune, June 9, 1963) The preparations
to change St. Ann’s to a nursing home had begun. The
memorable years of the St. Ann’s facility ended with the
Franciscan final health program, a resident home for the
aged. The building’s name was then changed to St. Francis
Nursing Home. It contained single and double rooms as
well as three-bed wards. Beds were always at full
capacity. The home had a reputation of being one of the
best. Marian Stellick Pavela (SFSN 1947) says, “it had
good people, giving good care.”
(conversation, June 2003) The facility closed in
2001.
Today the former St. Ann’s Hospital is largely used for
storage. Many of the corridors and empty rooms have a
rather forlorn appearance. Parts of the building are
being utilized however: The Franciscan Skemp Credit Union
is in the basement level. Upstairs on first,
Kraus-Anderson Construction Company modified areas into
large, bright spaces for their on-site project management
offices during the erecting of the new Franciscan Skemp
Center for Advanced Medicine and Surgery. Presently the
interior of St. Ann’s appears vastly different than when
it was first described in a La Crosse Tribune and
Leader Press feature story of January 1, 1928.
According to the article, the new St. Ann’s was the city’s
largest building project in 1926-1927. The hospital was
praised for its “decidedly modern lines and many original
features.”
A distinctive, brighter interior at St. Ann’s belied the
old institutional feeling of earlier structures.
Corridors were wide with rubber tile flooring laid in a
different design on each floor. Solariums at the south
end of corridors let in light through windows of colored
art glass. Fine, solid, red oak doors, four feet wide,
opened into patient rooms. Most rooms faced east. Their
long windows offered a view of the bluffs at town’s edge.
The windowsills were made of gray marble. Room closets
had ample capacity for a patient’s belongings. It was a
place, overall, of cheerfulness and warmth. An efficient
new system of call lights alerted medical personnel to a
patient’s needs. When the patient pressed a call-button
at bedside, seven lights showed in various areas of the
department. Additional decorative features extended even
to the stairways between floors; well-lit, they were
marble with ornamental railings. The interior seemed both
beautiful and practical – all this, the entire building
composed of six floors, was completed in six months by
Peter Nelson and Son Construction of La Crosse.
Not much has been written about the exterior of the St.
Ann’s building. The 1928 Tribune article briefly
reported that it had a “hard surface brick and pyro bar
tile exterior.” From a sidewalk view today, red bricks
give the building’s exterior a warmth that avoids an
industrial or commercial look. Evidently the seventy
seven-year-old exterior has survived undamaged. In all
appearances, the structure was built to last. The
Tribune report of 1928 states that the hospital was
constructed of concrete and heavy steel beams with “each
floor built as a complete unit in itself.” The reality of
this process was that, over the years, it presented great
difficulties in converting the building to other uses.
Frank Kube, a former chief maintenance engineer at St.
Francis Hospital, says that St. Ann’s may have been built
too well. According to Kube, although extensive
remodeling has been done in St. Ann’s over the years,
“masonry walls and a lack of standard service utilities
have made an upgrade to efficient heating and air
conditioning very difficult.”
The City of La Crosse Wisconsin Architectural and
Historical Survey Report, July 1996, by Joan Rausch
and Richard Zeitlin, refers to the St. Ann’s building,
which was designed by Parkinson and Dockendorf Architects
of La Crosse, as “a significant example of institutional
architecture in an abstract 20th Century
interpretation of the Romanesque Revival Style.” Eric
Wheeler, Architectural Historian of La Crosse, considers
St. Ann’s to be “a very significant building.” Dr. Joseph
Durst, retired Franciscan OB/GYN physician, says that St.
Ann’s “fits into the neighborhood.” The neighborhood of
which he speaks is a section of blocks within the city
that has a blend of old and new buildings forming the
Franciscan campus. The structures uniformity of
appearance gives the neighborhood a Franciscan identity.
St. Rose Convent, Viterbo University, St. Ann’s – the
oldest of the health care facilities – and more recently,
the new Center for Advanced Medicine and Surgery, have
design features in brick and stone which retain
established similarities. Kevin Buehlow, of the
Franciscan Skemp Public Affairs Office, calls this “a
harmony of the buildings on campus.”
More than one hundred years
ago, the Sisters of St. Rose Convent began a mission
devoted to education, health care and missionary services.
Sisters started teaching, in 1872, at St. Joseph and St.
Mary’s Catholic grade schools in La Crosse, and in two
parochial elementary schools in Iowa.
(A chapter of Franciscan History,
Sister Mileta Ludwig. pp 438-439)
Today, 132 years later, incredible numbers of former
students owe their education to a long-line of dedicated
teachers from the Order of the Franciscan Sisters of
Perpetual Adoration. When, in 1883, the sisters began
patient care in their new St. Francis Hospital in La
Crosse, another phase of the FSPA’s ministry had begun.
St. Ann’s, like St. Francis School of Nursing, occupied a
chapter in the history of the Franciscan health and
education ministries. Father Henri Nouwen, the late
theologian and author, once said, “Ministry is
compassion.” At St. Ann’s, the Franciscan tradition of
compassion was evidenced in a continuum of care. This
care included welcoming new life in the maternity suite,
embracing full-life care in other areas of the building,
and finally, ensuring the dignity of the aging in what
became St. Francis Home.
Virginia Marcotte
Larkin
SFSN class of 1951
Special Acknowledgements
A special
thank you to Rita Soller Swinghamer (SFSN 1946) for
counting all of St. Ann’s births from 1927–1963.
Thanks to
Col. Joseph E. Marcotte, Retired US Army Reserves, for
providing information on Fort McCoy.
Also,
thanks to Catherine Burke Schmidt (SFSN 1939) and Marian
Stellick Pavela (SFSN 1947) for conversations about St.
Francis Nursing Home.
History of St. Ann’s Hospital
La Crosse, Wisconsin
1912 – 2001
Virginia Marcotte Larkin
SFSN class of 1951
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