Santa Fe Memorial Hospital, Inc.

The hospital belonged to a railroad association, not to a town. The Handbook says Temple's promoters and Santa Fe officials set up the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Hospital Association in 1891, and a small hospital opened on March 2, 1892, for railroad employees along the line from Galveston to Purcell, Oklahoma. Dr. Arthur Carroll Scott arrived that October as chief surgeon. The old hospital merged with Scott and White on July 5, 1983, and as the Scott and White Santa Fe Center it housed drug and alcohol rehabilitation, geriatric programs and a family medicine clinic.

What the plaque says

Santa Fe Memorial Hospital, Inc. The first hospital in Temple, this institution opened in 1891 for employees of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad. The first section of the present building, completed in 1908, replaced an earlier frame structure. Until 1948 nursing care was provided by Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. Early staff members Dr. A.C. Scott, chief surgeon, and Dr. R.R. White later formed the noted Scott and White Clinic. Now a general care facility, Santa Fe Memorial Hospital serves as a reminder of Temple's early development as a railroad town. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 0.8 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 18 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Milam County Courthouse and Jail — 28 mi
  Cameron's 1892 Renaissance Revival courthouse and the 1895 St. Louis-built jail beside it, now the county museum, are listed together on the National Register.

More markers nearby

• W. Goodrich Jones (1860-1950) — steps away
• Ralph Wilson, Sr. — 0.6 mi
• Cora Anderson Negro Hospital — 0.6 mi
• First Lutheran Church — 0.6 mi