Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium / Roger Bacon Seminary

The friars who bought the sanatorium belonged to a province with deep roots on this river. Franciscans of the Province of the Holy Gospel in Mexico City, working through their custody in New Mexico, founded the missions of the El Paso del Norte area in 1659 and 1680, two missions near the site of Presidio in 1683 and a short-lived Jumano mission in 1684. Of the thirty-eight Spanish missions in Texas, eight were staffed from that New Mexico custody. Centuries later the Diocese of El Paso counted Roger Bacon as one of two Mexican seminaries in the city.

What the plaque says

Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium / Roger Bacon Seminary The Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium, built in 1914, was a tuberculosis hospital under the supervision of two El Paso physicians, Charles M. Hendricks and James Laws. At the time, many doctors believed that most lung diseases could be treated successfully in a high, dry and sparsely vegetated climate. El Paso, a railway hub next to the Franklin Mountains, was one of several cities in the American West that became major tuberculosis-treatment centers, attracting patients from across the United States. The Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium housed El Paso's only bilateral artificial pneumothorax device, a machine that collapsed a patient's lung, allowing it to rest and recuperate. Sanatoriums declined in popularity during the 1930s as doctors began to treat tuberculosis patients locally and disappeared entirely when effective antibiotics became available the following decade. The Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium closed in 1940. During and after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), El Paso became home to thousands of Mexican refugees fleeing political and religious persecution. Among those refugees were the Franciscan priests of the province of the Holy Gospel, who left Mexico City and moved to El Paso to train catholic priests and to serve the city's growing Hispanic population. The Franciscan order purchased the former sanatorium and transformed it into the Roger Bacon Franciscan Seminary. For more than seven decades, the seminary has educated young men for the priesthood. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chamizal National Memorial — 2.3 mi
  A park on land the Rio Grande once put in dispute, where a century-old border quarrel between the United States and Mexico was settled by treaty and a new concrete channel.
• Magoffin Home State Historic Site — 3.4 mi
  A U-shaped adobe of the 1870s in central El Paso that joins Mexican building to an Anglo plan, closed for restoration through 2027 while its visitor center stays open.
• Ysleta Mission (Corpus Christi de la Ysleta del Sur) — 9.8 mi
  The Tigua mission church at Ysleta, rebuilt in 1908 around the walls, bell and Santo Entierro that came through fire, its interior painted with rain clouds and corn.
• Franklin Mountains State Park — 10 mi
  Almost 27,000 acres of desert mountains inside El Paso, with the oldest rocks in Texas, more than 100 miles of trail and campsites in the Tom Mays Unit.

More markers nearby

• Radford School — 0.3 mi
• Fort Bliss, C.S.A. — 0.6 mi
• Mabel Welch — 1.2 mi
• Memorial Park — 1.2 mi