St. Joseph Medical Center & the Poor Handmaidens of Jesus Christ

by Tom Castaldi

The first hospital to be established in Fort Wayne was St. Joseph Hospital.  Organized in 1868 by sisters of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, it was under the leadership of Mother Katherine Kasper, the Superior of the order.  Mary Catherine Kasper was a remarkable woman, born in 1820 in Dernbach, Germany, who overcame her lack of formal education and dedicated herself to prayer. She founded a society with four other women and took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and then founded the Congregation of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ on August 15, 1851. The community grew teaching, caring for the poor, boarding factory girls, and encouraging Christian values eventually expanding to nine countries.

After Bishop Luers convinced Mother Kasper to send eight sisters to Fort Wayne, their first home was the old Rockhill Hotel which the order had purchased earlier that year and which still marks the center of the modern hospital.  Located on the outskirts of town at Broadway and West Main Streets, the sisters refurbished the old canal hotel converting it into a mother house to operate as St. Joseph Hospital. 

Acquiring the old hotel did not come easily. Bishop John Luers, the first bishop of Fort Wayne, tried unsuccessfully to get the Allen County Commissioners and city council of Fort Wayne to share the burden of purchasing and repairing the building. Undiscouraged, Bishop Luers organized group of citizens in the formation of the St. Joseph Benevolent Association, and with his personal funds and those raised by the Association, bought the hotel and made it ready for the sisters who arrived in May, 1869. They were still scrubbing the facility when the first patient entered. Dr. Isaac Rosenthal, a German immigrant who had arrived in 1847, performed the first operation in the hospital in 1869 and became the first chief of staff for medical services.

Nurses and beds were at a premium. In the first year, Sister Mary Henrica, having prepared the meals one day, went on second shift keeping watch all that night at the home of a sick person. When she returned the next day for some much needed rest, she found her bed had been given to a patient the night before.

The sisters began a regular program of caring for the poor so that those with severe medical problems would not simply be placed in the “poor farm.”  The hospital grew steadily over the next several decades, and with additions in 1879, 1912, and 1929, included an isolation ward. By 1918, a nursing school had been established; in 1946, the hospital opened a technicians’ school.  In the last half of the twentieth century, the hospital changed its name to the Saint Joseph Medical Center.  A new facility replaced all the older structures; a major area of specialty for the Medical Center is its Regional Burn Center.  Once again the name Saint Joseph Hospital identifies the facility and is part of the Lutheran Health Network. 

Originally published in Fort Wayne Monthly “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi”

 June 2009 No 55

 

Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com.

 

Stained glass in History

by Nancy McCammon-Hansen

 As we prepare to have new windows installed in our building this spring, we are taking a look at our exhibits to determine what will be done with them as the workmen remove old windows and install new. The weather being what it’s been this year, we’re conscious of rain, wind, (but hopefully not snow!) as well as security for our artifacts. In the process of cleaning and doing some maintenance on exhibits earlier this month, we found that with a little re-arranging in our downstairs galleries, we were able to once again put on display a stained glass window from the chapel that was once in the original convent at St. Joe Hospital. St. Joe was founded by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus in 1869 in the former Rockhill House hotel located on the southwest corner of Broadway and Main Streets.

The window uncovered--you are looking toward Barr Street.

Randy Elliott, exhibitor, and Karen Butler-Clary, registrar, examine and clean the window.

Close up of one of the panels.

Stained glass was used in the Far East as long ago as 306 B.C. With the birth of Gothic architecture, stained glass became more common and “.. the full value of glass as a transmitter of light and a polychromatic decorative material was fully appreciated. Gothic window-openings called for a filling strong enough to keep out the weather, yet transparent enough to admit the light; on the other hand, as, in this form of architecture, the wall-spaces were necessarily small, the windows offered the only opportunity for the decorator's art in so far as it depended upon colour. As glass at that time was to be had only in small pieces, the glazier was compelled, in order to fill the window-openings, to make his lights a mosaic, that is a combination of pieces of glass of various sizes and colours worked to a given design by placing them in juxtaposition. These pieces of glass had to be kept in place by some other material, and the best medium for the purpose was found to be lead, applied in strips made with lateral grooves for the reception of the edges of the glass.”

Ref: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14241a.htm

One of the best examples of the use of stained glass can be found in Chartres Cathedral in Chartes, France. Here is a photo I took several years ago of just one of many stained glass windows there. If you go to France, you must go to Chartres, if for no other reason than to see this Cathedral.

The website http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/arthistory/StainedGlass/history.cfm provides more information on stained glass if you’d like to do further study. The information below was written by Shannon Fitzgerald.

In the Romanesque Period of the 12^th Century, “the relatively small windows of the period were designed to admit as much light as possible. Thus, images made with predominantly red and blue glass were then surrounded by white glass. In the Gothic Period of the 13th - 14th Century, more geometrical shapes were incorporated into windows and decorative borders employed.

“The emergence of the Rose Window at St. Denis Cathedral and Chartres Cathedral, both in France, greatly influences the field throughout Europe as providing a means to depict more complex ideas as embellishments in Biblical narrative become prevalent.


“Stained glass witnessed its greatest diversity in design, style, palette and sentiment during the Gothic period. This diversity in approach combined with the skilled artistry that developed with the formation of regulated guilds and a wide array of technological advances elevated the medium to a position of preeminence that would remain unsurpassed.”


During the Reformation in the sixteen century, glass makers sought more secular commissions as the making of religious imagery came with severe penalties. Many stained glass windows were destroyed in churches including those in France and England.


“With the emergence of enamels in the sixteenth century, glaziers began to imitate Renaissance painters and applied thick coats of enamel to the surface, as if painting a canvas. Also, transparent glass gave way to heavily painted opaque glass. The more this was practiced, the more distant old stained glass techniques became. The artistry and skill, that had reached their zenith during the Gothic period, became a lost art. During the nineteenth century Sir Joshua Reynolds and other luminaries completely disregarded the medium and continued using enamel in this vein. For approximately two hundred years stained glass fell out of favor due to massive destruction, religious iconoclasm, preference for Renaissance styles, the rise in enamels usage, and a lack of knowledge of old techniques. Stained glass was not widely produced and did not again receive critical attention until its revival in the nineteenth century.”


Many of Fort Wayne’s older churches have stained glass windows. Here are a few photos from Trinity Episcopal Church, at the corner of Fulton and Berry, which was completed around the time of the end of the Civil War. If you have photos of local stained glass windows in our community that you would like to share with the History Center’s Facebook followers, please send them to nancy.mccammon-hansen@fwhistorycenter.com.