This is the final in a series of three “Images” essays on the evolution of The Gulf & Ship Island Hospital, founded in Hattiesburg in 1902 and built on a four-acre site at the end of Bay Street (600 Hall Ave. and Bay) in 1903, into Hattiesburg Hospital by May 1908, later to become King’s Daughters Hospital at Hattiesburg, equipped with 55 beds, and finally into Methodist Hospital by 1921. Mississippi Methodists, led by Hattiesburg timber baron W. S. F. Tatum, formed a hospital committee in 1918 to locate, erect, or buy a hospital to create a Methodist hospital in Hattiesburg. By 1920, the Methodists purchased the King’s Daughters site, and by 1921 Methodist Hospital was chartered and opened. In November 1925, the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, voted to erect a 75-bed hospital at a cost of $265,000 at this site to replace the existing structure. This new hospital structure was completed and occupied in 1926. This hospital would remain at the Hall Avenue / Bay Street location, undergoing several major renovations, until it was relocated in 1980 as a 201-bed facility on 39 acres in West Hattiesburg. Methodist Hospital evolved further into Wesley Health System by 1984 and subsequently into the 211-bed Merit Health Wesley in 2015. The first image shows the Methodist Hospital in Hattiesburg in the late 1930s, its iconic arched front gate emblazoned with ‘Methodist Hospital’ in front of the new hospital built in 1926. The second image, which dates to 1941, shows a side view of the 1926 structure, revealing changes to the landscape.
If you have an old or even somewhat recent photograph which would be of interest to Mississippi physicians, please send it to me at drluciuslampton@gmail.com or by snail mail to the Journal. — Lucius M. “Luke” Lampton, MD; JMSMA Editor
