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HRMC celebrates 80 years of providing health care

When Haywood County was first organized in 1808, medical care was mostly practiced at home on a do-it-yourself basis, with herbs, habitshanded down by the Cherokee, and a few self-taught skills.

Haywood County briefly had a small hospital during the Civil War, but by the time Mission Hospital was organized in 1885 in Asheville, patients from Haywood County who were too sick to be cared for at home were taken there.

The Bonny Castle Hotel, which stood near the foot of the hill on Pigeon Street in Waynesville, was acquired in 1907 and converted into a facility known as Waynesville Hospital.

A temporary hospital was set up at the old Mission School building in Canton in 1917 to address a serious outbreak of typhoid. The next year, the federal government set up a hospital in the White Sulphur Springs Hotel in Waynesville, first to treat patients with tuberculosis, then to handle military casualties.

In the spring of 1922, the Champion company hospital applied for a certificate of dissolution and newspapers began printing letters from people discussing the need for a new county hospital. On June 21, 1923, the name of the Waynesville Hospital changed to Haywood County Hospital, with the county board of commissioners purchasing stock in the facility.

It wasn’t long, however, before state legislators gave Haywood County commissioners permission to cease operation of the hospital on Pigeon Street, sell the property and call for an election to decide the issuance of bonds to build a new hospital.

In 1926, voters approved a $100,000 bond referendum. Haywood County was the first county in the state to build a public hospital.

By November 1926, work started on a new hospital on five acres about one mile east of downtown Waynesville. With the cost of construction exceeding the bond amount, the newly appointed hospital board appealed to the Duke Endowment and was the first hospital to receive Duke Endowment funding assistance ($10,000).

The Haywood County Hospital became a model for other county hospitals in the state. Experts agreed that the hospital represented the best outlay of buildings and equipment for the amount of money invested than any institution they had visited.

The three-story hospital opened Dec. 31, 1927. It was originally a 75-bed facility, but two expansions in 1952 and 1958 brought capacity to 140 beds. The first expansion, a 50-bed addition, made the Haywood County Hospital the 14th largest in the state at the time.

The first baby born in the new hospital was William Millar (March 17, 1928), who years later would serve as legal counsel for the hospital.

In 1933, the hospital’s governing board decided to build a nurses’ home adjacent to the Haywood County Hospital. The Duke Endowment Fund paid half of the $12,000 cost and much of the labor was done by persons on relief rolls. About 100,000 bricks from the old county jail were used, since a new jail had been completed at the courthouse two years earlier.

The number of patients continued to increase. In 1975, a $14.5 million bond issue was approved to build the new hospital on 17 acres of land donated by the late Rev. LeRoy Brunson George and his wife, Evelyn, of Lake Junaluska.

The Haywood County Hospital Foundation was formed in 1978 and raised $1 million to provide the new hospital with modern furnishings and state-of-the-art equipment.

The new modern hospital was completed in 1979. The 1927 building is now occupied by the school system and department of social services.

During the mid- to late 1990s the largest expansion of health care services and technological advancements began, prompting the hospital’s name to be changed in 1997 to Haywood Regional Medical Center, which better reflected the growth of services to areas outside of Haywood County. The medical center was reorganized as a non-profit hospital authority in 1997, with no public funding other than county assistance for indigent patients.

An urgent care center opened in 1996 on the hospital campus. In 2005, a second urgent care center opened in Hazelwood.

A commitment to wellness, preventive care and rehabilitation services led to the construction of the Haywood Regional Health & Fitness Center adjacent to the hospital in 1998.

Community needs for emergency care services prompted construction of a new emergency department in 2004.

As Haywood Regional Medical Center continues to respond to the needs of the community, plans for expansion are underway for a new surgery and outpatient services center and a hospice end-of-life center, as well as a pilot program for mental health services. Haywood Regional Medical Center is the third largest employer in Haywood County, with more than 900 employees, 137 physicians and 39 allied health professionals.