Janet C. Pittard - A Hospital for Ashe County: Four Generations of Appalachian Community Health Care

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN STUDIES

1.Memoirs of Grassy Creek: Growing Up in the Mountains on the VirginiaNorth Carolina Line. Zetta Barker Hamby. 1998

2.The Pond Mountain Chronicle: Self-Portrait of a Southern Appalachian Community. Edited by Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper. 1998

3.Traditional Musicians of the Central Blue Ridge: Old Time, Early Country, Folk and Bluegrass Label Recording Artists, with Discographies. Marty McGee. 2000

4.W.R. Trivett, Appalachian Pictureman: Photographs of a Bygone Time. Ralph E. Lentz II. 2001

5.The People of the New River: Oral Histories from the Ashe, Alleghany and Watauga Counties of North Carolina. Edited by Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper. 2001

6.John Fox, Jr., Appalachian Author. Bill York. 2003

7.The Thistle and the Brier: Historical Links and Cultural Parallels Between Scotland and Appalachia. Richard Blaustein. 2003

8.Tales from Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia. The Cratis Williams Chronicles. Cratis D. Williams. Edited by David Cratis Williams and Patricia D. Beaver. 2003

9.Willard Gayheart, Appalachian Artist. Willard Gayheart and Donia S. Eley. 2003

10.The Forest City Lynching of 1900: Populism, Racism, and White Supremacy in Rutherford County, North Carolina. J. Timothy Cole. 2003

11.The Brevard Rosenwald School: Black Education and Community Building in a Southern Appalachian Town, 19201966. Betty J. Reed. 2004

12.The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music. Edited by Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson. 2005

13.Community and Change in the North Carolina Mountains: Oral Histories and Profiles of People from Western Watauga County. Compiled by Nannie Greene and Catherine Stokes Sheppard. 2006

14.Ashe County: A History; A New Edition. Arthur Lloyd Fletcher. 2009 [2006]

15.The New River Controversy; A New Edition. Thomas J. Schoenbaum. Epilogue by R. Seth Woodard. 2007

16.The Blue Ridge Parkway by Foot: A Park Rangers Memoir. Tim Pegram. 2007

17.James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature. Edited by Ted Olson and Kathy H. Olson. 2008

18.Owsley County, Kentucky, and the Perpetuation of Poverty. John R. Burch, Jr. 2008

19.Asheville: A History. Nan K. Chase. 2007

20.Southern Appalachian Poetry: An Anthology of Works by 37 Poets. Edited by Marita Garin. 2008

21.Ball, Bat and Bitumen: A History of Coalfield Baseball in the Appalachian South. L.M. Sutter. 2009

22.The Frontier Nursing Service: Americas First Rural Nurse-Midwife Service and School. Marie Bartlett. 2009

23.James Still in Interviews, Oral Histories and Memoirs. Edited by Ted Olson. 2009

24.The Millstone Quarries of Powell County, Kentucky. Charles D. Hockensmith. 2009

25.The Bibliography of Appalachia: More Than 4,700 Books, Articles, Monographs and Dissertations, Topically Arranged and Indexed. Compiled by John R. Burch, Jr. 2009

26.Appalachian Childrens Literature: An Annotated Bibliography.Compiled by Roberta Teague Herrin and Sheila Quinn Oliver. 2010

27.Southern Appalachian Storytellers: Interviews with Sixteen Keepersof the Oral Tradition. Edited by Saundra Gerrell Kelley. 2010

28.Southern West Virginia and the Struggle for Modernity. Christopher Dorsey. 2011

29.George Scarbrough, Appalachian Poet: A Biographical and Literary Study with Unpublished Writings. Randy Mackin. 2011

30.The Water-Powered Mills of Floyd County, Virginia: Illustrated Histories, 17702010. Franklin F. Webb and Ricky L. Cox. 2012

31.School Segregation in Western North Carolina: A History, 1860s1970s. Betty Jamerson Reed. 2011

32.The Ravenscroft School in Asheville: A History of the Institution and Its People and Buildings. Dale Wayne Slusser. 2014

33.The Ore Knob Mine Murders: The Crimes, the Investigation and the Trials. Rose M. Haynes. 2013

34.New Art of Willard Gayheart. Willard Gayheart and Donia S. Eley. 2014

35.Public Health in Appalachia: Essays from the Clinic and the Field. Edited by Wendy Welch. 2014

36.The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity. Todd Snyder. 2014

37.African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia: A History, 19001965. Phoebe Ann Pollitt. 2015

38.A Hospital for Ashe County:Four Generations of Appalachian Community Health Care. Janet C. Pittard. 2015

Janet C. Pittard

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN STUDIES, 38

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

ALSO OF INTEREST

Stephen Shoemaker: The Paintings and Their Stories
(Stephen Shoemaker and Janet Pittard, 2013)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2414-3

2016 Janet C. Pittard. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Edited by Robert Franklin

Typeset by Phyllis Efford

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the community of Ashe County,
who gave of themselves to build a hospital to serve their own
and created a health care legacy spanning generations.

Many people have assisted and encouraged me over the past year and a half, suggesting people to interview, relating anecdotes, searching their attics for photographs and news clippings, and helping me to accurately weave together the story of Ashe Memorial Hospital and four generations of Appalachian community health care. To all those who shared with me their time, their memories, and their hearts, thank you for making it possible for me to tell this story. I am indebted to Doris Oliver for identifying people for me to interview and answering my many questions about the old hospital and its staff; to David VanHoy for sharing his wealth of knowledge of the area and its people; to Anne Shoemaker McGuire for her guidance and encouragement in researching the local landscape; and, especially, to my dear friend Evelyn Jones, for introducing me to the many delightful and interesting people she persuaded to be interviewed for this book and for being my navigator on the back roads of Ashe County. I will remember the many hours we spent together with gratitude and affection.

My brother, David Chiswell, is my ace when it comes to finding a needle in a haystack of historical information. An archivist by trade, he provided me with invaluable research, sought out pertinent reference books, photographs, microfilmed copies of newspapers, and manuscripts from Special Collections at Appalachian State University, the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, and the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The images reproduced in this volume are an important part of telling the story, and I am grateful to McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, not only for their interest in this project, but for their help with scanning and preparing the images for publication. Special thanks go to artist Stephen Shoemaker for allowing his painting of Ashe County Memorial Hospital to be used as the cover.