This is a photographic image of Pineview General Hospital (sometimes spelled as two words “Pine View”) and Training School for Nurses, established by the Finkbine Lumber Company (later Finkbine-Guild Lumber Company) at D’Lo, Mississippi, in 1915. It was one of the more important hospitals in the state during its period of operation. In that year, 1915, the extensive Finkbine lumber interests, which had begun in Iowa but moved to Mississippi in 1901 with the purchase of a large lumber mill at Wiggins in Stone County, embarked on an even more ambitious Mississippi yellow pine lumber operation in Simpson County. The company invested more than $1 million to erect the greatest lumber mill ever built in the state, an all-electric powered lumber sawmill, which was state-of-the-art technology. Soon after it was built, this massive mill, located just north of D’Lo, employed a daily workforce of 800 and produced over 600 million feet of longleaf pine timber over its life. The mill, which opened in the summer of 1916, contained two band saws, a gang saw and a resaw and had a cutting capacity of 200,000 feet in ten hours. The mill’s lumber was harvested in parts of Simpson, Rankin, Scott, and Smith Counties, the distances between traversed by dummy railroad lines of about 50 miles. The success of the endeavor resulted in the Finkbine offices moving from Wiggins to Jackson by the end of 1918. Within a few years, the number of residents in D’Lo grew from 400 to 5,000, thereby making it the most heavily populated town in Simpson County and the largest town between Jackson and Hattiesburg following the line of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad, a critical means of transporting the lumber. During this time, the town sported ten grocery stores, two YMCA buildings, three appliance stores, a furniture store, seven meat markets, five cafes, three garages, three drug stores, a dry cleaner’s, a bank, the D’Lo Herald newspaper, three hotels, several boarding houses, a professional basketball and baseball team, and extensive mill operations, which included thousands of houses for the mill workers, a three-story school, and a massive company-owned mercantile store.
Perhaps, the most significant institution the company established at D’Lo was Pineview General Hospital, a 20-bed medical and surgical hospital, staffed by several Finkbine-employed physicians. Like the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad Employees Hospital established in Hattiesburg in 1902, the Finkbine Lumber Company established an exceptional hospital as an employee health benefit, as had been done by many other industries at the time. Although the hospital cared for the mill employees and their families, it was not restricted to them and cared for all who needed care. The Simpson County News of Mendenhall noted that this "three-story hospital…was considered the best hospital between Jackson and the Gulf Coast (Sept. 12, 1985). This photograph, imprinted on a period postcard, shows a large, elegant, seemingly two-story frame structure with extensive screen porches in the back; a basement provided a third floor. Although the hospital was formed as a separate stock company, the lumber company subsidized its operations. The hospital staff was composed of Dr. Martin Luther Flynt (1880-1948), who long served as the hospital’s first superintendent and president, and Drs. Riley Wilson Burnett (1891-1973), who served as assistant superintendent until his move to Biloxi in 1926, and Grover Cleveland Russell (1884-1959), who originally served as a Finkbine lumber camp physician in Rankin County before coming to Pineview to replace Burnett. The Simpson County News reported on Feb. 11, 1926: “Dr. and Mrs. G. C. Russell are being welcomed as residents of New D’Lo. Dr. Russell is serving as Assistant Superintendent at the Pineview Hospital and no doubt he and his family will make a delightful addition to D’Lo society. They will reside in the Glaze house.”
Dr. Flynt was a respected and beloved surgeon who had graduated from the University of Tennessee School of Medicine in 1908 and later became one of the first Mississippi members of the American College of Surgeons. He was known by his patients to bow in prayer before every surgery he performed. Other physicians who practiced in D’Lo as listed in MSMA Transactions of 1917-1921 included: Drs. Eugie A. Ross, Tillis Gandy, and J. C. Herrington. Also, Dr. James A. McCallum worked at the hospital before beginning his significant public health career in Maryland. When nearby Braxton was destroyed by a tornado on April 26, 1921, the hospital played a major role in relief efforts and caring for the injured.
The hospital developed a Training School for Nurses soon after it was created and by October 1925 had graduated six classes of nurses. Dr. Flynt was the inspired leader of this effort. Mrs. Etta Easterling, R. N., was the superintendent of nurses and long led the school. In its August 9, 1928 edition, The Simpson County News described the hospital’s nurse graduation exercises, held at the Y. M. C. A: “The Banquet Hall never looked lovelier than on this occasion, decorated with the class flower, zinnias…The nurses and the doctors of the teaching staff of the Hospital, the wives of the doctors, and a few other guests enjoyed the lunch and program…The address of the evening was made by Dr. Henry Boswell. In his usual entertaining way, Dr. M. L. Flynt presented diplomas to Misses Elizabeth Calhoun, Jewell Crosby, Zetha Horn, and Lydia Mae Magee. Friends of these charming young ladies wish for them great success in this, their noble chosen profession— one of the noblest that is permitted to womankind.”
Although the mill intended to operate for forty years, the amount of longleaf pine in its supply area was largely exhausted by August 1927, after which the mill switched to cutting and finishing redwood lumber shipped from a sister Finkbine-Guild Mill located in California. This international supply chain, which transported the redwood from San Francisco through the Panama Canal, then to Gulfport, and then up to D’Lo for processing, kept the mill busy for a short period, but the business was clearly struggling due to transportation costs, and the company’s support for the hospital declined. Dr. Flynt, long the chief of the medical staff there, would purchase Newton Infirmary as the Finkbine support weakened, and he left Pineview by the end of September 1928 and later moved to Meridian in 1933, eventually practicing with his two physician sons (The Newton Record, Sept. 6, 1928; Sept. 7, 1928; Dec. 13. 1928). The D’Lo correspondent for the Daily Clarion-Ledger commented on Dr. Flynt’s departure and the community’s hope for the hospital’s survival: “We regret very much to lose Dr. M. L. Flynt as he has endeared himself to the people and he will be missed but his going away will not change the attitude of the Pineview Hospital as it will continue to function as before and will be under the sole supervision of Dr. G. C. Russell who has had perhaps more post graduate training than any other doctor of his years service and he is pronounced the best diagnostician in this section of the state besides having had abundance of experience in surgery.” The correspondent continued: “The report that Pineview Hospital was going to move to Magee is absolutely unfounded but it will remain at the present location. The fact that the mill located here will probably be here for many years to come as the trucks alone are placing on an average of 40,000 feet of logs in the pond each day and every train coming from Gulfport has a cargo of redwood. It is understood that the Finkbine-Guild Lumber Company merged with the Great Southern Lumber Company, but that it is stated upon good authority that the Finkbine Lumber Company’s mill at this place was not included in this merger but would continue to operate as in the past which means a promising future for our town” (Daily Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 9, 1928; Simpson County News, Sept. 13, 1928). However, despite this optimism, the Finkbine company was facing existential pressures, and its operations came to an end by July 1, 1929, when the company sold all its timber lands, mineral leases, and railroad rights-of-way in Simpson County and Stone County to Wilbe Lumber Company, ending the life of a magnificent company that had provided Mississippi not only with significant economic gains but also with a significant medical legacy in its modern and well-conducted hospital and nurse training school at D’Lo.
Pineview Hospital continued to operate for more than a year after the Finkbines sold their operations, but Dr. Russell’s move to Jackson in September 1930 foreshadowed the hospital’s imminent closure (Daily Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 3, 1930; The Clarion-Ledger, June 9, 1959), and the hospital would be shuttered by 1932, a victim of the Great Depression and the collapse of the Finkbine-Guild Lumber Company. A Jackson newspaper reported in June 1932 that “equipment from the former Pineview Hospital at D’Lo will be used” in the prospective Magee General Hospital, which was being created under the direction of Dr. W. W. Diamond, who was a member of the medical staff of Jackson’s State Charity Hospital (Daily Clarion-Ledger, June 9, 1932). In many ways, Magee General Hospital, which opened for business on July 4, 1932, using bits and pieces of Pineview, was its descendant in caring for the people of Simpson County (Simpson County News, July 7, 1932). The prosperity of the community would precipitously decline in the Great Depression, and once the mill was fully liquidated over several years, the previous population gains dropped back to a lowly 400 residents by the late 1930s.
The community of D’Lo existed long before the Finkbine Mill arrived. It was established in 1836 by Brewster Jaynes, a state legislator who built three water-powered mills on the Strong River with his brother near the local falls, which eventually gave the name of Millhaven to the community. The community further evolved with the arrival in 1874 of W. R. May who purchased the Jaynes property. A post office was established on June 23, 1881, with the name D’Lo submitted by its first postmistress, Mary F. May. Local legend asserts that D’Lo received its unique name from “a railroad conductor who thought the place was ‘too damn low’ when he passed through it” (Simpson County News, Sept. 12, 1985). There are multiple other stories about the town’s name. One asserts that when the village applied for a name for the post office, someone misread the proposed name as “D’Lo” when it should have been something else. However, the most probable origin of the name is the one with intended historical relevance made by the postmistress: it came from a more ancient source, the French term for the area which persisted among the traditions of the locals, “De l’eau sans potable.” This name, which can be found on colonial French maps, marked the confluence of the Strong River and Sellers’ Creek, a term translated as “bad drinking water.” Thus, Mary May apparently intended to name the town “D’Lo” after the French term for “of water,” which the area was once known by. The Strong River, the source of the community’s water, comes from a translation of the Choctaw name for the river, “Bogue Homi,” meaning “bitter creek,” and is not derived from the river’s strong current but rather characteristics of the strong taste of the water in that area.
During World War II, D’Lo received wide national press, including a cover story in Life magazine (July 6, 1942), for sending more men per capita as soldiers than any other town in the United States. Out of its population of 400, D’Lo sent 150 of its men and boys to serve their country. One final “D’Lo” footnote is that the famous “Siren Scene” in the Coen Brothers classic movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000), where lovely sirens seduced Everett, Delmar, and Pete, was filmed on the banks and in the middle of the Strong River at the D’Lo Water Park. If you have further information on this hospital or 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
