“Perhaps the most important institution in Santa Anna, and of which she is just proud, is the well known Sealy Hospital, which is not only known throughout Texas, but in many other states,” reads an advertisement in the September 28, 1928, edition of the Abilene Morning Reporter-News. “The Sealy Hospital is thoroughly modern in every department. There are thirty-five beds, a new ten-thousand dollar nurses’ home, and owners are now anticipating a twenty-room addition to the hospital to take care of pressing demands. The hospital operates a state authorized nurses’ training school in connection. Every room in the new nurses’ home is equipped with hot and cold running water. The expert services of a competent staff of physicians is available at the Sealy Hospital.”

Towards the west end of Avenue B in Santa Anna, you can still see the remains of the Sealy Hospital, once an integral part of the town’s community. A few blackened pillars, from what I’m guessing might have been an old elevator shaft, still stand in the lot where the hospital was. Fifty yards or so up the hill is the structure that housed the hospital nurses, now a private residence. A lot of people in Santa Anna still remember the Sealy Hospital. The memories seem to be overwhelmingly positive, with many recalling being born or treated there in the 60s and 70s.

Beth Joyner, who grew up in Santa Anna, recalls her mother, Mary Ruth Lamb Irick’s time as a nurse at Sealy Hospital. “My mother was a nurse and worked there two different times, before and after the war,” Joyner said. “One time they called my dad because no car could get up the hill in the ice and snow. He would get them up the hill on horseback. My mother would bring home rolls of cotton and sit for hours making Q-tips. You couldn’t buy them back then. They wore the white nurses’ uniforms. My mother’s uniform was so stiff from starch she had to pull it apart to get dressed. They could not have any wrinkles in their uniforms. Wrinkles meant you’d been sitting, and there was no time for that.” Despite the hardness of her mother’s job, Joyner ended up becoming a nurse herself, and has been in the profession for 57 years.

Local author and Brownwood resident Gene Turney remembers being treated at the Sealy facility sometime in the early 60s. “I was a young man and the nurses were extremely caring. I had a rip in my calf that required 13 stitches. It was so professionally done, I did not feel a thing! I don’t remember much about the hospital, but I do remember the caring treatment I received,” Turney related.

Historian Ralph Terry, in his excellent book, Looking Backwards, History and Photography of Coleman County, Texas, recorded the details of the rise and fall of Sealy Hospital. The hospital, originally called Santa Anna Hospital, was begun by Dr. T.R. Sealy and a conglomeration of investors in 1917, opening in 1919. ”After the death of the founder and owner of the hospital, Dr. T. Richard Sealy, in 1939, the hospital was operated by other medical staff, including Dr. Roy R. Lovelady, Dr. Earl D. McDonald, and Dr. C.O. Moody,” Terry wrote.“In October of 1944, the nurses’ home at the Santa Anna hospital was badly damaged by fire.”. A student nurse lost her life in the fire while trying to warn the other nurses. The first building was a two-story structure, and was rebuilt after the fire, but this time with only one story.

Some local rumors have it that the building is haunted. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, they’re likely friendly ghosts, as the people there seemed to really care about their patients. According to Terry, his brother, Bruce Terry, found bills from the Sealy Hospital dating from 1947 when his grandfather died. “Sealy Hospital in Santa Anna charged $50.00 for a six-day stay there. The burial expenses ran about $250.00. Compare that to today’s cost!” Indeed.

After the fire, the hospital experienced a series of closures, reopenings and expansions under different owners. One of the owners, Dr. Charles von Henner, updated the hospital in 1952. Henner also bought the building at the east end of Santa Anna Mountain that was the old Texas Ranger Park and built a nursing home as well as another hospital there. The newer hospital eventually supplanted the older Avenue B site. Part of that complex of buildings is now the Ranger Inn (which is currently for sale, by the way, if you’re looking for a history studded investment). The Sealy Hospital on Avenue B, which drifted closed without fanfare sometime during the transition to the new facilities at the Ranger Inn location, burned down in 1982, but many fond memories of the place are still here.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com