St. Joseph Hospital Historic District

History

The Congregation of the Humility of Mary was already established in Ottumwa with a convent and an academy when the Sisters sought to raise $300,000 in the community and open a new hospital. They came up short and were only able to raise $78,000 Undeterred, they continued on with their plans and hired a hospital architect from Milwaukee who had previously designed the Mayo Clinic. The new hospital would be a five-story structure designed in a mid-century institutional style. The bricks for the building were made locally at the Morey Brick and Tile Company. It was completed in 1925 and an addition that included a chapel was built in 1959. Also built in the 1950s was a dormitory building for nurses and a four-story addition to the hospital with a single-story wing for administrative offices.

In conjunction with the hospital was the St. Joseph’s School of Nursing that had begun in 1914. It remained in operation into the mid-1970s, and in that time it graduated over 700 students.

St. Joseph Hospital at its height employed 350 people and provided 120 acute care beds. Ottumwa Hospital initiated several attempts in the 1970s to merge the two hospitals, but St. Joseph's resisted their offers. They did, however, agree to joint planning and cooperation. The two hospitals finally merged in 1987. The St. Joseph building served as office space and housed outpatient services until it was closed in 2012. The building was going to be torn down until Blackbird Investments developed a $14 million plan to renovate it into a 70-unit apartment building in late 2014.