St. Paul’s sanitarium opened its doors with 110 beds in 1898 after starting in a small cottage on Bryan Street in East Dallas in 1896. Run by Roman Catholic nurses, the private facility was conceived by Dallas physicians and civic leaders who appealed to Catholic Bishop Edward Joseph Dunne to convince the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul to open a hospital in the growing city in 1896.
In the early days, nuns visited patients in their homes, bringing food, clothes, and medicine to them after they left the hospital. Later, the nuns ran free neighborhood clinics closer to where the patients lived.
The land was purchased for $1, and the sisters traveled 1,200 miles by covered wagon from Maryland to begin providing care in a three-story Victorian building at Bryan and Hall Streets. Called the “finest hospital in the world, having all that is modern in equipment and appliances,” it was here where the St. Paul School of Nursing was established in 1900. Within 16 years, the hospital had added 200 more beds and was renamed St. Paul Hospital.
The hospital was vital in the fight against the 1918 influenza pandemic when forty-five tents were built to care for more patients. Despite a severe nursing shortage during this time, Dallas fared better than most cities during the pandemic, in part due to the efforts of St. Paul Hospital staff.
The hospital founded the St. Paul School of Nursing in 1900, and students studied, lived, and worked there during three years of training during the facility’s 71 years of operation.
Local women founded the Women’s Auxiliary in 1943 to make pajamas, gowns, sheets and pillowcases for patients and to operate a thrift store and hospital gift shop to raise money for patients. Over the years, the group donated millions of dollars for nursing scholarships, medical equipment, and thousands of volunteer hours.
In 1950, construction began on a larger 475-bed facility in Dallas. Despite a five-alarm fire in 1951, during which Sister Mary Helen Savage saved the lives of all 250 patients and employees, the new building opened in 1952.
The hospital was the first private facility in the city to open its doors to Black physicians to practice medicine in 1954, partly due to its proximity to the Freedman’s town of Short North Dallas. The hospital had previously built the Marillac Clinic to serve Hispanic residents in Dallas’ Little Mexico neighborhood.
In 1963, St. Paul opened a 484-bed, $15 million, 10-story hospital near UT Southwestern. As the hospital opened, 96 adult patients and 16 babies were moved by a caravan of ambulances over the course of five hours without incident during the year’s first snowstorm. Later, the city’s first heart transplant occurred there in 1985.
Ascension Health Care turned the center over to Methodist Health Care System in 1996. In 2000, UT Southwestern purchased the property; it was demolished in 2015 and replaced by Clements University Hospital.
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