By Kathy Brown, Groveland Yosemite Gateway Museum/Southern Tuolumne County Historical Society
Did you know that a little more than 100 years ago the Groveland area could boast that it had a hospital? Before the first hospital was built here, Doctor Stratton of Chinese Camp, one of the earliest physicians to serve the area, did his doctoring in his home and made house calls by horse and buggy over a very wide area which included Groveland and beyond.
In 1915 San Francisco bought acreage in Groveland where Mary Laveroni Park, the Groveland Museum and Library, and the CalTrans yard now stand. The acreage was developed into an administrative and support services headquarters for the Mountain Division of the Hetch Hetchy Water Project. This mammoth undertaking constructed a dam to impound the waters of the Tuolumne River in the wilderness on the northwest edge of Yosemite. Its gravity-fed pipeline still brings pure mountain water to Groveland and the citizens of the San Francisco area. With a project as massive as building the O’Shaughnessy Dam and the pipeline from it to Moccasin and beyond, they realized that, inevitably, there would be many accidents. Some of these would involve major injuries necessitating a nearby facility with an operating room and doctors and nurses to staff it. Among the plans for their multi-building service area was the construction of a small hospital on the hill to the north of Garrote Creek.
While the San Francisco headquarter’s hospital was being constructed a temporary care facility was needed. The City chose to set up their interim hospital in a building about a block south of Main St. on Powder House Road. The house, which still exists, has at its core one of Groveland’s oldest buildings made of adobe. It is one of only four adobes still standing in town. Some sources say it was built by a pioneer miner, Peter King about 1849. The name John King has also been connected with the house a little later. It is known that Frances Martin owned the property in the 1870s and sold it to J.J. Sheehan in 1884. In 1896 Mary Ann Sheehan acquired the property after JJ’s death. She added a two-story frame structure which encircled and hid the adobe. Mary Ann, who became Mary Ann Schroeder, also operated the Schroeder Hotel and Bar which once existed on Main Street about where the parking area is in the center of town. It is believed that the structure on Powder House was built as a boarding house for miners working in newly-opened hard-rock mines of this area. It was known as the Elite Hotel. While San Francisco was developing their administrative headquarters they converted the boarding house on Powder House to serve as a temporary hospital for their project until their new hospital could be constructed. The upstairs of the house was converted to an 8-bed ward with a sun-deck built over the car port.
The first doctor to serve at that temporary hospital was Dr. Elisha T. Gould, who had been one of Sonora’s leading physicians. He graduated from Maine Medical School with experience in hospital practice. After arriving in Sonora in early 1880s he established a very busy and respected medical and surgical practice. In 1887 the Goulds bought a very impressive 10 room Queen Anne home with a multi-gabled roof and 10’ ceilings in downtown Sonora. The doctor had investments in mining, ranching and pharmacy. He managed the County Hospital for 20 years. In the 1913 typhoid epidemic he traveled to vaccinate people throughout the county. His stint at the Hetch Hetchy hospital, where he also trained nurses, came late in his career and was brief probably due to a heart condition from which he died in 1923. A Dr. Homer Rose took over for him.
In December 1918 San Francisco opened their newly completed two-story hospital. The new Groveland Hospital had a large ward room and 5 private rooms. It was very conveniently located right next to the the Hetch Hetchy Railroad tracks. This made it easy to transport workers injured on the project from one of the work sites nearly to the door of the hospital. The transport was done by specially built gas-powered track buses medically outfitted to serve as ambulance cars. These track cars or buses ran on the same tracks as the the big trains delivering equipment, goods, and men to the project sites. Ambulance car #19 had a self-contained turn-table under the floor. It could be jacked up and turned around anywhere along the track for a speedy pick and delivery to the hospital. The doctor sometimes went by rail to the accident site in the case of a severe injury. The ambulance cars also transported those hurt at a rodeo site that existed in Buck Meadows near the rails.
San Francisco’s city employees and contract workers were charged $1 a month for hospitalization insurance, automatically taken from their pay. Residents from the Groveland area also benefitted from the building of the hospital since they now didn’t have to drive to Sonora for emergency medical care or hospitalization. They were charged usual hospital rates.
On July 27, 1922 a fire broke out at the hospital. Thirty patients were safely evacuated from the hospital wards. One of those evacuated out of a second-story window of the hospital was a young mother with her new-born baby in her arms. Tragically, 24 year old nurse Ethel Moyer, who was one of the last to evacuate, was badly burned and suffered a broken back after jumping from the second story. She died the next day. The hospital was destroyed but a temporary hospital was set up in the Men’s Clubhouse (workers’ dorm) next door. A one-story hospital (with basement) that could hold 75 patients was quickly built. All patients would now be on the ground level and unlike the first hospital all doorways were wide enough to push a bed through. It served the public until its closing in 1934 when it was dismantled in accordance with the Raker Act after the construction work of Hetch Hetchy’s Mountain Division was competed.
Who staffed this hospital on the edge of the wilderness? Find the answer in part 3 next time.
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