Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanitorium

Hilltop began as a rest home. In 1943 a cluster of small shacks on Leopard Street offered 21 beds to tuberculosis patients, who were kept apart so they would not infect their families. The hospital that replaced them in 1953 had screened porches where patients lay in deck chairs in the open air, since rest was the main treatment. In 1956 it became the first facility in Texas to enforce the state quarantine law, with lockup rooms for patients who left. Its medical director said they were rarely used. Patients protested when the county closed it in 1968.

What the plaque says

Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanitorium The Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanatorium was the answer to Corpus Christi and Nueces County residents in need of a dedicated treatment facility for tuberculosis (TB). Known as consumption, TB dates to antiquity and remains endemic in much of the world. In the 1800s, TB was still at the epidemic level and medicine had no cure to offer sufferers. In the early 1930s, Mrs. Fannie Weil Alexander, the Red Cross chairman of Nueces County, and a group of interested women from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) inaugurated tuberculin testing among the city's school children, established the Nueces County Tuberculosis Association and convinced the city to hire a public health nurse. The association, with the help of Mrs. H.E. Butt, founded the Nueces County Tuberculosis Clinic on Caldwell St. and employed Elsie Wolle to make house calls. As more cases of TB were found, larger quarters were needed. A site on Leopard St. was acquired with five acres and a small house on a hill. The entire community helped stock the sanatorium with staff, equipment and supplies. Despite community support, the Hilltop Sanatorium continued to suffer from overcrowding and was basically a collection of one-room shacks joined together with screened porches. In 1949, a bond election passed to build a new facility. A new, six-wing hospital with 100 beds opened in May 1953, fully staffed. As more effective treatments became available, patient numbers at Hilltop began to drop. With a free, State TB Hospital in Harlingen, the County closed Hilltop in 1968. Over the years, the former hospital was renovated into community meeting rooms. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Aquarium — 12 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 12 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 13 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.
• Mirador de la Flor — 13 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• Nuecestown Cemetery — steps away
• Nuecestown Raid — 0.6 mi
• Calallen — 2.6 mi
• Bethel Baptist Church of Christ and Cemetery — 5.7 mi