Good Samaritan Hospital (Leland Avenue)
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Good Samaritan Hospital served Dallas residents at this location on Leland Avenue for approximately 25 years. Martha Schultze, a registered nurse, opened the facility c. 1920. Schultze received nursing training in her native country, Germany, before immigrating to the United States. She worked in private duty nursing and in hospitals for twelve years before opening Good Samaritan Hospital. Her husband, Ernest, operated a clinical laboratory here which was associated with the facility. When Good Samaritan Hospital opened, staff specialized in maternity services. By 1933, enlargement of and additions to the building, which included an operating room, allowed for the hospital to also offer general services. Staff consisted of registered nurses, student nurses and other aides. Good Samaritan Hospital offered medical treatment to residents throughout the neighborhood, including the elderly, the infirm and those who were unable to afford payment. Good Samaritan Hospital closed in 1945. Martha Schultze, who died in 1966, ran the facility for the entirety of its operating years. Today, it continues to be remembered as a facility that served residents of the area regardless of income or status. Hundreds of children were born in Good Samaritan Hospital, which, through the enterprising efforts of a German immigrant, treated those in need in the growing city of Dallas. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Around 1920 Martha Schultze, a registered nurse trained in her native Germany before immigrating to the United States, opened Good Samaritan Hospital on Leland Avenue, where her husband Ernest ran an associated clinical laboratory. Starting with maternity care, the hospital added an operating room and general services by 1933 and treated neighborhood residents—elderly, infirm, and those unable to pay—until it closed in 1945. Schultze ran it for the whole of its roughly twenty-five years, and hundreds of children were born under its roof.
Why it matters
It shows how immigrant women helped build the everyday health-care institutions that served America's growing cities regardless of a patient's means.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1920s, Dallas was booming. Cotton money, oil wealth, and the railroads had turned a modest county seat on the Trinity River into one of the fastest-growing cities in the Southwest, and neighborhoods were filling in faster than the institutions that served them. Hospitals in that era were often small, private affairs — a converted house, a handful of beds, a few trained nurses — rather than the sprawling medical centers we picture today.
This was also the height of the Progressive Era's push to professionalize care. Nursing was becoming a credentialed vocation, and "registered nurse" meant real, examined training. Yet for working families, the elderly, and the poor, a serious illness or a difficult childbirth could still mean going without help entirely.
Into that gap stepped small neighborhood hospitals like the one that once stood here on Leland Avenue. It served its corner of a growing city for roughly a quarter century, from about 1920 until 1945 — the span that carried Dallas from the Jazz Age through the Depression and into the Second World War.
People & events
The hospital was the work of Martha Schultze, a registered nurse who had learned her profession in her native Germany before immigrating to the United States. By the time she opened her own facility around 1920, she had already spent a dozen years at the bedside — in private-duty nursing and in hospitals — accumulating the experience most people would call a career before starting hers over as a founder.
She did not do it alone. Her husband, Ernest, ran a clinical laboratory here, tied to the hospital's work — the kind of behind-the-scenes analysis that lets a small institution do more than its size suggests. Together they built something that grew with the neighborhood around it.
At first the staff specialized in maternity care, and over the years hundreds of children drew their first breath under this roof. By 1933 the building had been enlarged and an operating room added, so the hospital could offer general services too, staffed by registered nurses, student nurses, and aides. Martha Schultze ran the place for the whole of its existence, treating the elderly, the infirm, and those who simply could not pay. She died in 1966, long outliving the hospital she founded, which closed in 1945.
Its place in the American story
Martha Schultze's story is a distinctly American one told a thousand times over and remembered too rarely: an immigrant arrives with a skill, and builds an institution that quietly holds a community together. Across the country in the early twentieth century, much of the everyday work of healing happened in exactly these kinds of modest, locally run hospitals — often founded and staffed by women at a time when few other professions were open to them.
It also marks a chapter in how America came to care for people regardless of their means. Long before broad public health insurance, the promise that the poor and the sick would be treated anyway rested on the conscience of individual founders. Here, that promise had a name and an address.
And it is a reminder of how much immigrant women contributed to the physical fabric of the nation's growing cities — not only labor, but leadership, training, and institutions that outlasted them in memory if not in brick.
If you visit
Come to this spot in Dallas expecting a marker rather than a building — the hospital itself is long gone, and the neighborhood has moved on around the ground where it stood. What you are visiting is a memory, deliberately placed so a busy modern street will still tell you what once happened on it.
Stand for a moment and picture the scale of it: not a medical campus, but a house-sized institution where a single determined nurse and her husband ran maternity wards, a laboratory, and eventually an operating room. Read the marker slowly; it is doing the work of keeping a founder's name alive.
If you're building a Dallas history road trip, this pairs naturally with the city's other Progressive-era and women's-history sites. It's a small stop, but a good one for anyone drawn to the people who built the ordinary institutions — the clinics, schools, and hospitals — that a growing America actually ran on.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Martha Schultze
- · Ernest Schultze
Themes & tags
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