A Frontier Infirmary for a Logging Boomtown
As Aberdeen's timber mills and logging camps surged with industrial activity, the Dominican Sisters established a hospital to care for the constant influx of injured workers.
The story, cleaned up
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One of the best and most important institutions in Aberdeen is the hospital established here this last summer by the Dominican sisters, of New York, an institution that is calculated to do great good on account of the accidents resulting from the many mills and logging camps that are in continual operation in this Grays harbor country. The sisters at present occupy three frame buildings, but the plans have just been completed for a large and commodious brick structure that will be built at once. From October 1st to December 31st, twenty-one patients were treated in the hospital, coming from all parts of the harbor. In almost every instance the patients were suffering from accidental injuries.
“An institution that is calculated to do great good on account of the accidents resulting from the many mills and logging camps.”
This early focus on industrial safety and medical infrastructure underscores the high human cost of the Pacific Northwest’s rapid timber expansion in the 1890s. Today, hospitals remain central to the region’s economic and social health, evolving from wooden frontier clinics into the complex modern systems that still treat the victims of our high-risk resource industries.
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