First Hospital on the High Plains of Texas, St. Anthony's Hospital

The four sisters who opened the sanitarium belonged to an order founded for Texas. Bishop Claude Marie Dubuis of Galveston, whose diocese then took in the whole state, recruited nursing sisters in Lyons, France, and the first three reached Galveston in late 1866, where yellow fever and cholera soon tested them. Three more went by stagecoach to San Antonio, and on December 1, 1869, they opened Santa Rosa Infirmary, the city's first hospital. By 1891 the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word ran eleven hospitals in Texas, New Mexico, Iowa and Missouri.

What the plaque says

First Hospital on the High Plains of Texas St. Anthony's Hospital Founded 1901 This marks site of Potter County's first hospital organized by Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word on invitation of Father David H. Dunne, Pastor of St. Mary's Church in Clarendon, Texas, and David Fly, M.D., Amarillo. Land was donated by Wm. H. Bush. Four Sisters opened hospital as St. Anthony's Sanitarium. Original building (demolished in 1955 to make room for present School of Nursing) was a 14 room red-brick structure without gas, electricity or telephone service. A 2-story addition in 1909 provided thirty beds and an operating room. Despite hard times, a School of Nursing was also opened that year. In 1922, a third story was added to 1909 building, presently used by the Sisters as a convent. In 1927-28, another addition enlarged facilities to 100-bed capacity and provided a laboratory, delivery rooms, X-ray rooms, and more surgical suites. A third addition in 1949 brought total capacity to 150 beds. A $2,000,000 addition in 1960 making St. Anthony's a 250-bed general hospital was made possible by funds raised by the Amarillo Area Foundation. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 2.0 mi
  Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
• Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 4.7 mi
  Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.
• Cadillac Ranch — 8.9 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.
• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 17 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.

More markers nearby

• Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, First Railroad through the Texas Panhandle — 0.6 mi
• A.T. & S.F. No. 5000 "Madam Queen" — 0.7 mi
• Wild Horse Lake — 0.9 mi
• Henry B. Sanborn — 0.9 mi