Wichita General Hospital
Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
WICHITA GENERAL HOSPITAL Wichita Falls was a growing town in 1882 as professionals started to arrive looking for opportunities. Dr. Perrigo arrived in 1881 and is believed to be the first doctor to practice in Wichita Falls. In 1909, Dr. Samuel Burnside opened the first modern hospital. As early as 1884, the citizens and physicians of Wichita Falls expressed the need for a county hospital. In 1915, construction finally started on a 40-bed hospital. Local architects Field & Clarkson designed a three-story red brick building. It was named Wichita General Hospital. Wichita General Hospital’s school of nursing opened in December of 1915. By 1918, the new hospital was at its breaking point as the flu epidemic and population growth from the oil boom created a need for a bigger hospital. Construction of a fourth story created 55 more beds. Classroom expansion and office space were the only additions to the hospital until 1940 when buildings surrounding the hospital were purchased to house student nurses, classrooms and supplies. The next major addition to the hospital was in 1956 when expansion of the fourth and fifth floors was completed. In the 1960s, a new front entrance, the Frank Wood Chapel, the Gaines Educational Pavilion, Bridwell Surgical Pavilion and Streich’s Intensive Care Center were constructed. An additional project in 1983 added an infant intensive care unit. By the mid-1980s, community leaders began to consider how to more effectively and efficiently provide health care services and, in 1997, Wichita General merged with Bethania Regional Medical Center to form United Regional Health Care System. By 2011, all services had been consolidated to an expanded campus on 11th street; the Wichita General Facility was razed in 2013. (2014)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Wichita Falls' citizens had called for a county hospital since the 1880s, but construction of the 40-bed Wichita General finally began in 1915, its three-story red-brick design by local architects Field & Clarkson. A school of nursing opened that December, and within three years the flu epidemic and oil-boom population forced a fourth story; decades of additions followed before the hospital merged into United Regional in 1997 and the original building was razed in 2013.
Why it matters
The hospital's century-long growth mirrors how booming early-20th-century towns built the medical and nursing institutions that modern public health demanded.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1880s, Wichita Falls was a raw North Texas town still finding its footing on the rolling prairie near the Red River. The railroad was arriving, professionals were drifting in to hang out their shingles, and a place that had counted its buildings on two hands was suddenly a town with ambitions. When Dr. Perrigo settled in around 1881, believed to be the first physician to practice there, a doctor was often a one-person institution — clinic, pharmacy, and surgery rolled into a single saddlebag.
This was the Progressive Era, the decades on either side of 1900 when American communities came to believe that public well-being was something a town built on purpose, with brick and payroll and training. Clean water, schools, and hospitals became civic projects rather than private luck. A modern hospital was as much a statement of a town's arrival as a courthouse or an opera house.
So the story of Wichita General is really the story of a frontier town growing up. The citizens who began calling for a hospital in the 1880s were imagining a future their town had not yet earned. It took decades — and a great deal of local will — before the imagining turned into three stories of red brick.
People & events
The human thread runs from a single frontier doctor to a full teaching hospital. Dr. Perrigo represents the lonely early days of medicine here; a generation later, in 1909, Dr. Samuel Burnside opened the town's first modern hospital, a leap from the era of the country doctor toward organized, institutional care.
The building most people came to know rose in 1915, after more than thirty years of the community asking for it. Local architects Field and Clarkson designed a three-story red-brick hospital of forty beds, a serious piece of civic architecture drawn by hometown hands. That December the doors opened not only to patients but to students: a school of nursing began almost at once, making the hospital a place that produced caregivers as well as cures.
The young hospital was tested almost immediately. By 1918 it was straining at every seam. A regional oil boom was pulling people into the area faster than beds could be built, and the great influenza pandemic that swept the world that year fell hard on crowded, growing towns. The answer was to build upward — a fourth story added fifty-five more beds. From there the additions kept coming for decades: expanded upper floors in the 1950s, a chapel and surgical and intensive-care pavilions in the 1960s, an infant intensive-care unit in 1983.
Its place in the American story
Wichita General is a compact case study in how the modern American hospital came to be. Across the country in these same decades, care moved out of the home and the doctor's office and into purpose-built institutions — and, crucially, into the hands of trained professional nurses. A hospital with its own nursing school, opened the very month it received its first patients, was part of a national transformation in how Americans were born, healed, and died.
Its growth chart also traces the pressures that shaped twentieth-century public health: sudden population surges, the devastating 1918 pandemic, and the mid-century expansion of surgery and intensive care. Each new wing marked a new capability that medicine itself had only just acquired.
And its ending is just as characteristic of the American story. By the late twentieth century, small independent hospitals were consolidating into regional health systems for efficiency and reach. Wichita General's 1997 merger into United Regional, and the eventual move to a single expanded campus, echoes what happened in countless American cities as scattered community hospitals gathered into fewer, larger institutions.
If you visit
Come here knowing you are visiting a memory rather than a building. The original three-story hospital, thickened over the years into a five-story landmark, was razed in 2013 after its services moved to a consolidated campus elsewhere in the city. What remains is the marker and the ground itself.
Stand where the hospital stood and try to picture the scale of the thing that grew from one prairie doctor's practice: the red-brick block of 1915, the fourth floor stacked on in a hurry as flu and oil-boom crowds pressed in, the chapel and pavilions that accreted across the mid-century decades. This was a place where generations of local nurses trained, where the town's residents were born and mended for the better part of a century.
It makes a thoughtful stop on a drive through North Texas, especially paired with a look at Wichita Falls' historic downtown. The marker rewards the traveler who likes to read a town's ambitions in its institutions — and who appreciates that a community can spend thirty years wanting something, then a hundred years building it, and still choose to move on when the work outgrows the walls.
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
- · Dr. Samuel Burnside
- · Dr. Perrigo
Themes & tags
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