2204 Hampton Street
Good Samaritan-Waverly Hospital
In the 1930s, the Duke Endowment and Rosenwald Fund recommended merging Columbia’s two black hospitals to consolidate community and financial support and provide patients with better healthcare. In 1939, Good Samaritan Hospital, a nurse training school founded in 1910 by Dr. William S. Rhodes and his wife, Lillian, and Waverly Hospital, founded in 1924 by black physician Dr. Norman A. Jenkins and his four brothers, reorganized to form Good Samaritan-Waverly Hospital.
The hospital needed a modern facility, and although it was managed by a bi-racial board, fundraising for the new structure was left to the black community. In 1944, the board appointed Modjeska Monteith Simkins, human rights advocate and former public health official, as campaign director of the fund, with a goal of raising $100,000. Despite meeting this goal, rising costs led to the suspension of the campaign while the board sought federal funding. Simkins led a second drive in 1950, and the hospital finally opened in 1952 with state-of–the-art amenities, including a pharmacy, two operating rooms, a laboratory, an X-ray room, and a 50-bed capacity. It closed in 1973 due to broad desegregation of public spaces in the previous decade.
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Nurses pose on the steps of old Good Samaritan Hospital. Image courtesy John H. McCray papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
