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A Ready Haven of Refuge


The Battle to Control Health

Them old Dutchmen, them old Germans—they’d work all day in a factory in Bryan, then head home to work on the farm. It was like they couldn’t be sure the factory would last, and they wanted to hang on to the farm, just in case—because a farm is forever, you know. So them old fellas worked twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day, and you never heard ’em complain. People in Bryan, Ohio, have been telling that story for generations. It’s true, mostly.

Williams County was a place of hard work. Always had been. Pancake-flat land, out of the way—tucked under Michigan, spooning against Indiana—at first it was such hard work just traveling across it that white settlers didn’t bother. The Great Black Swamp covered much of northwest Ohio, including Williams County, making it so boggy that trails simply disappeared. So, while the southern parts of Ohio were growing cities and towns, the northwest was still a wilderness. Fort Defiance was there, in what is now Defiance County. General “Mad” Anthony Wayne had the fort built in 1794. He used this sole white outpost as a base from which to annihilate Native American villages for fifty miles around.

By 1830, twenty-seven years after Ohio became a state, there were still only 387 people in Williams County. Twenty years later, just 265 people lived in the new city of Bryan, the county seat. The Germans, the Dutch, and a few English, Scots, and Irish eventually did come for the water, the trees, and the land under the trees. They could dig down five feet and have all the water they wanted. In some spots, like the site of the courthouse in Bryan’s town square, the pressure underground was so great that natural fountains spurted from the earth. And so Bryan became known as the Fountain City, while outside of town early farmers cut and sold wood, drained the resulting fields, and planted crops.

Williams County’s geography could seem bleak and featureless, especially in winter, but railroads loved it because they could lay track across the land as fast as they could hammer the spikes. In 1855, the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad connected Bryan to Toledo and Chicago. With the rails came new markets for Williams County farmers and incipient manufacturers. Thanks to the railroads, Bryan’s population grew nearly tenfold between 1850 and 1870, to 2,284 people.

Resource-based businesses like tanneries, wood mills, and the wood asheries that made lye and potash gave way to the Bryan Plow Company, the Bryan Manufacturing Company (makers of wheelbarrows), and corn and wheat mills. Then came the Bryan Specialty Company (makers of school bus and truck bodies), machine-tool makers, Spangler Candy, Bard Manufacturing (a maker of furnaces), Ohio Art (a metal novelties manufacturing company), and other, smaller enterprises. By the time of the stock market crash in 1929, Bryan was growing, prosperous, and looking to become a modern, progressive city.

One thing it did not have, however, was a hospital. Other parts of the Midwest, flush with money from burgeoning industries, were busy building community hospitals and clinics, vaccinating people, and improving sanitation. But health in Williams County, just as in some of the other rural counties in the United States, lagged behind. Dr. M. V. Replogle, the county’s first health commissioner, reported in 1922 that “conditions over the county are very bad in many places. People are negligent as to health conditions. Sewage and sanitation are faulty in several of the towns.” That year, the county reported thirty-nine cases of diphtheria, eighty-three of scarlet fever, twenty-seven of typhoid, two of spinal meningitis, seven of syphilis, and twelve of tuberculosis.

Though a smallpox vaccination had long been available—Massachusetts passed a mandatory smallpox inoculation law in 1809—outbreaks were common in Williams County. In 1924, a local epidemic of 149 cases forced its schools to close. Alarmed, the county finally mounted a vaccine drive. The inoculations worked: the following year, there was one case of smallpox.

People sometimes killed themselves. In 1918, George Hutchinson picked up a .32 Colt revolver and put it to his head. Floyd Detiviller hung himself with some baling wire. David Kaiser slit his throat with a straight razor in 1927. John Rang stepped in front of a Wabash train.

Those who were sickened by disease or damaged by injury had few options for medical care. A handful of doctors practiced in the county, but most were concentrated in Bryan, with a few more in Montpelier, a village about ten miles north that was becoming a railroad nexus.

If a flour mill exploded, or a grain farmer drove his truck through a rail crossing into an oncoming New York Central locomotive, or a gas station owner was shot in a holdup, or a manure spreader entangled a boy—the kinds of traumas that happened with uncanny regularity—the wounded had to be driven west into Indiana, or south or east into other counties. They sometimes died on the way.

Bryan was fifty miles west of Toledo, and fifty miles east of Fort Wayne (named for Mad Anthony). Yet, despite its rail connections to the outside world, it was self-contained. Social innovations like the hospital movement took a long time to penetrate.

By 1900, science and technology had expanded medicine to where hospitals were ceasing to be asylums for poor people to wait out disease or die in the process, while the rich were treated in their own homes. Wilhelm Roentgen invented the X-ray machine in 1895. Joseph Lister pioneered sterile surgery with antiseptic carbolic acid mist in 1865, and by 1900, steam sterilizers were common. The Mayo brothers were operating on hundreds of patients every year in Rochester, Minnesota. In 1906, the Ohio Medical Society urged every county to build a hospital, while all over the United States a great burst of construction put hospitals even in small cities.

But the doctors of Williams County were ambivalent about a hospital. The unquestioned medical authorities in the community, they enjoyed their status and their monopoly on the market. On one hand, a hospital equipped with the latest gear and tools could improve the medicine they practiced. On the other, it could threaten their dominance by attracting competing doctors.

Bryan’s promoters, however, realized that the city had fallen behind. To be considered a modern community, a town needed a hospital not just to treat the sick, but also to attract new manufacturers. So in 1915, the Bryan Businessmen’s Association started a campaign to bring a hospital to Bryan. “Few towns in our class are without a hospital and many smaller ones have this most needed [of] conveniences,” the Bryan Press reported of the effort.

Theirs was the vision of a hospital as public good and community asset. There was little mention of money, except that the lack of it would be no barrier to treatment. “A city hospital will save lives and add comfort to the sick,” the Press added. “It will always be a ready haven of refuge for those in distress. It will give absolutely free service to the sick in need and without money.… It will lessen the number of persons dependent upon the city and county for charity.”

But money, like Satan, proved to be an inescapable companion to the angels of mercy. Bryan wanted its refuge, but it didn’t want to pay for it. The hospital idea died.

Three years later, as the worldwide Spanish influenza pandemic killed tens of millions, local leaders resurrected it. The fire chief suggested saving money by transforming an old school on Bryan’s Cherry Street. The chief’s enthusiasm failed to sway tightfisted taxpayers.


Copyright © 2021 by Brian Alexander