Alexandria's Oldest Hospital

The Alexandria Sanitarium opened in January 1903, started by six area physicians in a two-story wooden building at Second and Lee streets downtown. It held twenty beds, and rates rose as high as three dollars a day. The town around it was still small, with 5,648 people at the 1900 census, but it would double by 1910 to 11,213, and the sanitarium grew with it. After several name changes and building projects it became Rapides Regional Medical Center, which marked its 120th anniversary in 2023.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 0.4 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.1 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 4.8 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Alexandria Holocaust Memorial — steps away
• St. Francis Xavier Cathedral Complex — steps away
• Emmanuel Baptist Church — 0.2 mi
• The Hotel Bentley — 0.3 mi