Those Places Thursday - St. Barnabas Hospital

    In the Portland, Maine of the late 1920's and early 30's, there were several medical facilities founded by individual physicians, and, as such, were known as their "private hospitals."  My mother, for instance, was born in 1931 in Dr. Leighton's Private Hospital on Emery St. in Portland.

    Dr. William Lewis Cousins also founded his own hospital, Dr. Cousins' Private Hospital, which later was named St. Barnabas Hospital, where my father was born in 1930.

As Harold Boyle described St. Barnabas, in the following 1978 "The Way It Was" article for the Press Herald, "many prominent Maine persons were born in it and it supplied the Woodfords area with its first emergency facilities."

Thank goodness my mother marked this clipping!

Three stories marked by a distinctive cupola, it stood at 231 Woodfords St., opposite the present-day Woodfords Congregational Church.  As described by Michelle Souliere, on her great blog, Strange Maine, "the hospital boasted a terraced lawn, a broad, glass-enclosed sun parlor, an elevator, and refrigerator ice gleaned exclusively from Sebago Lake."