Lewis and Clark County Hospital Historic District

In 1871, Lewis and Clark County purchased 160 acres two miles north of Helena to create a residential facility for the homeless, infirm, and out of work. The original “poor farm” facilities accommodated eighteen “inmates,” but a new building, constructed in 1885, housed approximately one hundred. The complex also included a superintendent’s residence (1891), a detention hospital (1901), a garden, and a nearly two-acre cemetery. The residents, almost exclusively male and often foreign-born, suffered from such afflictions as alcoholism, tuberculosis, fractures, epilepsy, syphilis, rheumatism, dementia, and eye infections. Women passed through a few times a month, usually to give birth. Although work requirements faded by the 1920s, patients were still encouraged to perform “light labor” in the twelve-acre vegetable gardens and wheat fields. Stays ranged from weeks to decades. For forty-one years (1920-1961), county physician Sid Cooney tended to patients’ daily medical needs. In 1935, a magnitude 6.25 earthquake destroyed the main hospital building, forcing residents to evacuate first to a temporary camp at the fairgrounds, then to St. Peter’s Hospital. Four years later, the Late Deco/Early Moderne style building opened, complete with a surgery room and maternity ward. A reporter visiting the complex in 1944 described it as a “community of persons” who lived “not in squalor or poverty. . .but in clean, comfortable and wholesome surroundings with friendly companionship.” In its final decades, the hospital served mostly elderly residents; in 1961, it formally transitioned to the Cooney Convalescent Home.

Location

Metadata