History and Roots: Hope, Courage and a Ten-Dollar Ticket Build a Hospital
Image from The Daily Reveille, September 15, 1899, Whatcom Museum #X5824
by Susan Dewitt, CSJP
The two young Sisters who first set foot in the Pacific Northwest and founded St. Joseph Hospital seem almost impossibly courageous today. In 1890 thirty-three- year-old Sister Teresa Moran and twenty-seven-year-old Sister Stanislaus Tighe were chosen to set out for Washington, newly a state, and to build a hospital in that pioneer country.
They had all of three months’ training, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn, for their work in health care. They thought they were headed to Tacoma, a thriving city on Puget Sound, but found when they arrived that they would be sent north to Fairhaven (now part of Bellingham, Washington), a new community serving farmers, miners and lumberjacks. There they found a home with Mrs. Huguenin, who “in her cheerful, happy humor… would set about providing for their comfort, especially when they came back to her in chilly and stormy weather, through newly made roads that ran rivers of mud and which were almost impassable.”
The Sisters navigated those rivers of mud to travel out to the lumber camps and mines, selling their version of health insurance, a ticket that, for $10, gave the bearer a year of hospital services. With those funds plus money raised in town by helpful businessmen, they were able to build the first St. Joseph Hospital in three months, a small, two-story frame building that would house the sisters and up to 30 patients. “Fancy two creatures like us to build a hospital.” wrote Sister Teresa to Mother Evangelista, “If it ever succeeds it will be by the visible power of God alone.”
The new hospital was built just in time for the northwest winter, and on their first night in it the sisters, those lions of courage, shook with fear as a winter storm blew up. “The chimneys were overthrown. The terrific noise of the bricks tumbling around on the roof was the signal for the caving in of the whole structure when all would be over… The firm resolution was taken that if Almighty God spared them until morning, back to Jersey City they would go rather than live exposed to such danger.” But in the morning they realized that only the chimneys had been lost, and their Fairhaven friends told them not to worry, that the hospital would stand.
Given hope by their new community, the sisters agreed to stay a little longer, and after experiencing a few more winter storms, they became accustomed to the uproar. That first tiny hospital was the seed for today’s St. Joseph Hospital and the PeaceHealth system, now 10 hospitals strong in Alaska, Washington and Oregon.
This article was published in the Spring 2018 issue of Living Peace.