Brackenridge Hospital

The City-County Hospital opened on July 3, 1884, in a two-story stone building that cost $10,000. Wings added from 1929 to 1941 raised capacity to 208 beds, and a $43 million, 363-bed building rose in the 1970s. The city's first intensive-care unit opened here in 1960 and its first alternative birth center in 1978. The hospital ran the area's first nursing school from 1915 to 1984. After losing more than $6 million in 1975-1976, it stayed in city hands when the council voted in 1978 to keep it.

What the plaque says

Brackenridge Hospital When Edwin Waller surveyed the Austin townsite in 1839, he sat aside this block, in what was then the Northeast corner of the city, for a hospital. The site lay empty until 1884, when the City of Austin and Travis County jointly opened a 20-bed, two-story facility known as City/County Hospital. During the early 1900s the City purchased the County's share of the hospital and assumed full responsibility for its operation. In 1912 Dr. Robert John Brackenridge (1839-1918), a retired physician, worked for the passage of a bond election that allowed construction of a new, 45-bed facility, which was completed in 1915. The 1884 building was razed in 1927, and two years later the name of the hospital was changed to honor Dr. Brackenridge. Since then, expansion of facilities and services has meant quality medical care for citizens of Austin and the surrounding area. Over the years, the hospital staff has cared for victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, the mid-20th century polio outbreak, and the 1966 sniping attack at the University of Texas. As the state's oldest continuing public hospital, Brackenridgewas the site of the first intracranial and open-heart surgeries and of the first kidney transplant in central Texas. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.5 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.5 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.6 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 0.6 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.

More markers nearby

• Site of Samuel Huston College — 0.2 mi
• Joseph Baker — 0.3 mi
• Major William Martin "Buck" Walton — 0.3 mi
• Jacob Fontaine — 0.3 mi