Anyone who has seen the “World’s Largest Penny” in Woodruff knows the story of Dr. Kate Newcomb and the fundraising drive to open Lakeland Memorial Hospital in 1954, the first hospital in Minocqua.
Tomahawk looked to the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother to start Sacred Heart Hospital 60 years earlier.
Father Charles Hoogstoel of St. Mary’s Church secured a property donation adjacent the church and parsonage from Tomahawk’s city founder William H. Bradley.
Hoogstoel knew the chaplain of St. Joseph Hospital in Marshfield, Father Joseph Joch, who was advisor to the sisters of this fledgling order. After receiving permission from Bishop Messmer of the Green Bay diocese, and from Mother Frances Streitel who founded of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother in 1883, Father Joch drew up the building plans and supervised the construction.
The young city was filled with people in dangerous occupations felling timber, driving logs down river, or working in one of several local sawmills. In the late 1800s, most people who needed medical care received it at home. House calls in Tomahawk were made by Dr. John D. Cutter. Prior to the completion of the hospital building, the Sisters provided care for patients above a Wisconsin Avenue business, and in the Spirit Avenue home of a local resident.
Construction began when the ground thawed in 1894. Locals donated time and their teams of horses to excavate and invest in the effort. The two story frame building was dedicated July 20, 1894.
Hospitals had been places of mercy serving the chronically ill or indigent. Medicine began to accept the importance of antiseptic conditions. Acute care and surgery patients began to be treated in these controlled environments, and hospitals charged for the procedures.
Unfortunately, the new hospital ledger didn’t balance, and the sisters had find creative means to keep Sacred Heart open. They accepted second-hand bed linens, pulled threads apart and re-used the lint in place of cotton batting. They collected their own fire wood for heating and cooking.
And, to raise funds to pay the construction mortgage and operate the hospital operation, they traveled from camp to camp and sold hospital tickets to lumbermen.
Lumberjacks, who most often had no home or family in the area, were the primary customers. In time of illness their “home” was Sacred Heart. In a memoir, Sister M. Dionysia Griebel of Sacred Heart wrote about a lumberjack who bought a ticket every year and came to the hospital whether he was sick or not. He said, “I must visit my home at least once a year.”
After 1900, the sisters commissioned ticket agents to bring in more patients and more income. Agents served territories and traveled camp to camp selling tickets which entitled hospital admission, medical and surgical treatment for one year from the date of the ticket sale. The necessary length of the hospital stay was judged by the attending physician. Tickets initially sold for $5.
The Tomahawk territory included 72 camps, not including sawmills. An agent could receive 15% of the sales. The agent submitted the roster of the “insured” to the camp foreman who invoiced the company. The lumberjacks were paid in the spring. The company deducted the hospital’s share from the pay and sent it directly to the hospital.
In turn, local men contributed sweat equity work on the hospital grounds. They sawed and split wood, painted, and helped in the barn and garden.
The original hospital site served into the 21st century. The modern Ministry Sacred Heart Hospital, a 55,700 square foot facility which replaced it, opened in 2003 at a location adjacent the Hiawatha Trail.
Source: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wilincol/TomahawkStories.htm