For over a hundred years, Coshocton County Memorial Hospital has been a touchstone of the county, literally from birth to death. Let’ s talk about the first part of the history of what used to be called The City Hospital.

Local philanthropist Henry D. Beach, founder of the Beach Co., donated the land on which the main Walnut Street body of the hospital still stands in 1909 with the support of his lawyer, F. E. Pomerene. The only proviso Mr. Beach insisted on was that the deal was only for a public hospital that legally could not bar anyone from its services, regardless of race, religion, creed, gender, ethnicity or ability to pay. After rigorous debate, the city council ultimately voted unanimously to accept.

In 1910 the architectural plans were finalized: three

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stories of brick, electricity and running water, and nearly 13,000 square feet total. It promised to revolutionize medical care in the area. The first floor was nine private wards, an office and a parlor; the second floor was the operation department and nurses’ quarters; and the third floor was apartments for cooks, waitresses and additional service workers.

Multiple civic organizations announced plans to furnish rooms there throughout 1910 and 1911, using the Carnegie Library as their home base including local women’ s clubs and manufacturing firms. The City Hospital opened Feb. 12, 1912, with 25 beds. For

Submitted

For over a hundred years, Coshocton County Memorial Hospital has been a touchstone of the county.

use of a ward bed, a patient paid $ 10 a week($ 322 today).

Coshocton City Hospital Nurse Training School opened in 1912, providing a room, board, salary and an education. The first Coshocton girl to take up an apprentice nurse’ s position at Coshocton City Hospital

was Alice Wimmer that year.

The City Hospital proved so valuable to the county’ s residents that in 1916 public pleas by doctors and nurses convinced the city council to put on an addition. The addition, finished in 1918, allowed the hospital to add an elevator, a second operating room and room

to increase from 25-62 patients. This also allowed the nurses’ school to keep state recognition, add graduate nurses and increase salaries to account for inflation.

By 1920 The City added a ward for patients who could not afford to pay. In 1923 the city council announced the building of a nurses’ home, a charity fund was established to provide inpatient medical care at the hospital to those unable to pay and Elfrieda Erlandson became the first Coshocton woman to be superintendent. In 1924 the Coshocton City Hospital School for Nurses was placed on the accredited list of Ohio schools. Operating room nurse Irma McGregor and hospital cook Eva Dickerson even put their own careers on the line in 1931 to publicly challenge the decisions of an incompetent hospital superintendent, Mary Binkley.

A 1936 bequest from Ernest Bachert provided Coshocton City Hospital $ 250,000( more than $ 5.7 million now) for the benefit of Coshocton County children with polio, enabling The City to build a new children’ s division, hire physiotherapist Eva O’ Connell and establish a children’ s charity. It is in memory of Bachert that the City Hospital carried the name“ Coshocton Memorial.”

About 1937, The City Hospital became one of the“ stations” established by

Coshocton Public Library Director Margaret Sahling around the county, acting as an outpost prior to the bookmobile. A 1938 federal grant matched a bond issue from Coshocton, so the hospital added a three-story addition and doubled the size of its nursing classes. By the early 1940s, the Coshocton Memorial Hospital School for Nursing was so well-regarded that Coshocton’ s Central High School ran an unofficial prenursing program for students. Academics at the actual nursing school were demanding at this time. Training included men’ s medical care, women’ s medical care, contagious diseases, pediatric medicine and psychiatry.

Perhaps the decade of greatest and most lasting change to The City Memorial Hospital was the decade when it became no longer The City Hospital, the 1950s. But that’ s next month’ s story.

Information for this article is selected from a longer program given at the Coshocton County District Library in March 2025. For more programs like this, visit Coshocton County District Library in person, visit our website at www. coshoctonlibrary. org or call us at 740-622-0956.

This column is written by Lasha Philabaum, adult services coordinator at Coshocton County District Library.

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