Cholera, a growing city and a Catholic hospital

In 1854, St. Paul was a river town on the American frontier. Its economy and population were growing quickly thanks to steamboats packed with Irish and German immigrants journeying north on the Mississippi River. Unfortunately, the same cramped conditions that made the inexpensive trip favorable for poor immigrants also bred disease.

That year, the immigrants brought cholera with them from river towns farther south, spurring an outbreak. As they shared drinking cups, utensils and water from a polluted river, they unwittingly spread the bacteria that caused the often-fatal disease.

It just so happens that 1854 was the year that a physician in London proved cholera was spread in drinking water polluted by human waste. But no one in St. Paul knew this yet. On top of that, St. Paul’s board of health worked hard to keep the outbreak quiet to promote business, so most people did not know to be concerned.

They did not want the press reporting on cholera, but the St. Paul board of health did take action to establish a system to care for cholera patients. When city representatives were unable to find a building for a hospital, Bishop Joseph Cretin volunteered a Catholic hospital under construction at that time in downtown St. Paul, at Ninth and Exchange Streets. In the meantime, St. Paul’s first church, a log chapel built in 1841 in what is now Kellogg Mall Park, became a temporary hospital staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Most of the patients they treated were new immigrants whose names were unknown because most wealthy residents at the time chose to have a physician treat them at home. Elsewhere in the city, the half-brother of President Millard Fillmore, Charles, succumbed to the disease. His obituary listed dysentery as his cause of death to avoid a panic.

When St. Joseph’s Hospital opened in 1854, it was thoroughly modern. The first stone building in St. Paul, it contained private rooms, balconies, a chapel, a laundry, an assembly room and a smoking room. A pump brought spring water to all four floors (when at least four sisters provided the labor to operate it) and the building was surrounded by walks and gardens. The sisters charged patients $8 a week, but those who could not pay were admitted free. The sisters nursed patients with the help of doctors. They cared for orphans in the same building and taught in schools on the grounds. The hospital became the main site for cholera care in the city. When another cholera outbreak struck the city in 1866, however, neighbors threatened to burn down the hospital rather than have cholera patients nearby, and the department of health built a quarantine station closer to the river.

Advances in medicine and sanitation made cholera increasingly rare in Minnesota, but St. Joseph’s Hospital and the Sisters of St. Joseph who ran it continued to serve the people of St. Paul. Over the years, the hospital changed. It was torn down and replaced in 1890 and then renovated and expanded numerous times. Although it no longer resembles the four-story building that opened in 1854, it does still occupy the same land that Henry Rice donated for the hospital on Exchange Street. In 1987, the hospital became part of the HealthEast care system, which merged with Fairview in 2017.

Luiken is a historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a lifelong Catholic in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.