Saint Joseph Hospital
Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the 1880s Fort Worth was a thriving railroad town. The Missouri Pacific Railroad Company established an infirmary near its headquarters to care for its employees. In 1885 the Congregation of Sisters of Charity of Incarnate Word, based in San Antonio, was asked to take over operation of the infirmary. Ten nuns traveled to Fort Worth to begin work at the Infirmary. When the work of the railroad was completed in 1889, the Congregation purchased the facility and it was renamed St. Joseph's Infirmary. St. Joseph's was Fort Worth's first general hospital, and from the outset ministered to charity patients. A new three-story brick structure was built in 1898, and over the years additional facilities were built to house the hospital's expanding services. The name was changed in 1930 to St. Joseph's Hospital, and again in 1966 to Saint Joseph Hospital. In addition to direct medical care, the hospital's programs have grown to include training for health care professionals as well as educational and counseling services for patients and their families. The county's first hospice program for terminally ill patients was inaugurated here in 1980. For over 100 years this hospital has served the community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In booming 1880s railroad-town Fort Worth, the Missouri Pacific opened an infirmary for its workers, and in 1885 handed it over to the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word—ten nuns who came up from San Antonio to run it. When the railroad's work wound down in 1889, the sisters bought the facility outright and made it St. Joseph's, the city's first general hospital, caring for charity patients from the start. A three-story brick building followed in 1898, and over the next century the institution grew to add professional training, counseling, and the county's first hospice.
Why it matters
St. Joseph's shows how Catholic sisterhoods built much of America's early hospital system, bringing organized medical care and charity to raw frontier cities that had none.
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