HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Winnie A. Scott Hospital Site

Frankfort, Franklin County, Kentucky

Marker Inscription

Site of Winnie A. Scott Hospital. The Women's Club Hospital Company, with community support, established a hospital here on Dec. 26, 1915. It was named for Winnie A. Scott, a local teacher instrumental in its founding. The facility was the only Frankfort hospital serving African Americans until desegregation of King's Daughters Hospital in 1959. Presented by Frankfort Civic Organizations and the Ky. African American Heritage Commission.

Erected by Kentucky Historical Society

The Story

On December 26, 1915, the Women's Club Hospital Company, backed by community support, opened a hospital here and named it for Winnie A. Scott, a local teacher who helped found it. In the segregated era it was the only Frankfort hospital serving African Americans, filling that role until King's Daughters Hospital desegregated in 1959.

Why it matters

The hospital shows how Black communities built their own vital institutions under segregation, and how women organized to provide health care the wider society denied them.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • Β· Winnie A. Scott

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Cheapside Slave Auction Block

Lexington, KY

On Lexington's public square, the Cheapside Auction Block was the site where thousands of enslaved African Americans were bought and sold in the nineteenth century, including children torn from their parents. By the late 1840s Lexington had become the center of Kentucky's slave trade and a market feeding the brutal export of people farther south. Nearby stood a whipping post, established in 1847, in a county where by 1860 one in four Lexington residents was enslaved.

The Courthouse and Enslavement

Oldham County, KY

The Westport courthouse, where Oldham County's first court sat in 1828, was as much an instrument of slavery as of ordinary justice, ruling on the sales, hire-outs, and escapes of enslaved people alongside its other business. One case charged Justice of the Peace William Gatewood with illegally hiring out Mahala, whose daughter Malinda was the wife of Henry Bibbβ€”the man Gatewood enslaved. Bibb escaped, became a celebrated abolitionist, and founded a colony in Canada for fugitive slaves; the court itself moved to LaGrange in 1838.

Muhammad Ali’s grave

Louisville, KY

Louisville's own Cassius Clay rose from the city's West End to become Muhammad Ali β€” three-time heavyweight champion and one of the most recognized figures of the 20th century. Beyond the ring he was a lightning rod: he embraced Islam, refused induction during the Vietnam War at the cost of his title, and became a global symbol of conviction. He was laid to rest in his hometown in 2016, his headstone carrying his own words on service to others.

Rev. William H. Sheppard

Louisville, KY

Born in Virginia in 1865, William H. Sheppard trained at Hampton and Stillman before being sent to the Belgian Congo as a Presbyterian missionary in 1890. His explorations won him a fellowship in London's Royal Geographic Society, and he became an early and courageous voice denouncing the brutal cruelties of Belgian colonial rule. Returning home, he served as a beloved pastor in Louisville's Smoketown community until his death in 1927.