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Please note The Museum of the Reconstruction Era will be closed for house tours Wednesday, Feb. 1 - Friday, Feb. 3 due to garden renovations.

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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.

  • Good Samaritan Hospital

    Nurses pose on the steps of old Good Samaritan Hospital. Image courtesy John H. McCray papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

34.010297, -81.0184716

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Historic Columbia

© 2023 Historic Columbia

Administrative Offices
1601 Richland Street
Columbia, SC 29201

Tours
All historic house and garden tours start at the Gift Shop at Robert Mills.
1616 Blanding Street
Columbia, SC 29201

Questions? Call (803) 252-7742.

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