At a quarter past midnight on July 15, 1933, masked men with revolvers stormed the Bide-A-Wee Inn on Muncie’s far-east side. Located where Oasis Bar & Grill is today, the busy roadhouse offered bandits a hefty take from the till and a quick getaway via Burlington Pike or Memorial Drive.
The Muncie Evening Press reported the robbers forced proprietor A.C. Skiff into the back and his staff down on the floor, then “looted the cash drawer.” They stole $75, about $1,700 today. Another henchman sat outside in “a green sedan with yellow wire wheels” and kept the engine running. The thieves piled in and sped down Memorial before police arrived.
Later that morning, cops found the car parked outside an apartment building at 515 S. Council St. in the Old West End. The Evening Press reported that “officers raided the apartment about 9 a.m.” and arrested three men from Indy: Noble Claycomb, Paul Parker and William Shaw.
Shaw confessed to the Bide-A-Wee job. He also implicated two others who got away—Harry Copeland, a small-time Muncie gangster, and John "Desperate Dan" Dillinger, the notorious Depression-era bank robber. According to the Evening Press, “Dillinger and Copeland had left the (apartments) where the three youths were arrested only a few minutes before.” Shaw later told detectives that Dillinger had robbed Daleville’s Commercial Bank and Montpelier’s National Bank that summer.
The South Council Street apartment house sheltering Dillinger’s gang was once Muncie’s first hospital. It was established as a small, private facility in 1891 by a husband and wife team, homeopathic doctors William and Emmer Whitney. The official name was Muncie Hospital and Invalids Home, but many Munsonians just called it Whitney Hospital.
When it opened in 1891, the Muncie Daily Times reported that “Drs. W.D. and E.A. Whitney, founders and proprietors of the institution, will move into the building next Monday and the establishment will be opened to the public about Sept. 15.” The two-story hospital had eight rooms that could accommodate up to 25 patients. For the time, it featured state-of-the-art amenities: hot and cold water, electricity and gas heat. The building also contained the Whitneys’ living quarters, a small operating room, and a basement kitchen and laundry.
The city desperately needed a hospital in the early 1890s. Back then, about 40 physicians practiced in greater Muncie. Most doctors saw patients in their offices and made house calls. However, before Whitney Hospital, surgeries were basically nonexistent in town and anyone with emergent needs had limited options. Exacerbating the situation, medical science in the late 19th century was limited, at best.
Although privately owned, the Whitneys contracted with the city to provide care for destitute Munsonians. In 1892, the city council subsidized the hospital $1,500 to support indigent patient care, followed by $500 every quarter (respectively, $50K and $17K today). After 1900, councilors compensated the Whitneys $1.59 ($60) a day for every city-sent, penniless patient.
As I gathered research for this column, I was blown away by the severity of patient maladies. This is naive of me, of course. Treating traumatic injuries and terrible disease is, in part, what hospitals do. But gruesome details seldom make it into modern press.
Not so in the late Gilded Age. I found hundreds of ghastly reports about Whitney Hospital’s patients between 1891 and 1919, including those suffering after horrendous accidents and from life-threatening, non-infectious disease.
The Whitneys also treated victims of sexual assault, made amputations, performed surgeries and delivered babies. Some Munsonians experiencing acute mental health crises went to Whitney, as did many victims of violent assaults. The city also sent gravely injured residents so they could die as comfortably as morphine allowed.
For instance, a Lake Erie & Western Railroad brakeman named William Doty was fatally injured after being dragged under a train in June of 1898. He was taken to Whitney where “Dr. Arthur Kemper and the Drs. Whitney did all that was possible to alleviate the victim’s sufferings,” according to the Press.
Despite the tragedies, local papers described good care at Whitney. In November 1899, Thomas Worl was treated after a gruesome accident at Muncie Iron and Steel Mill. The Meeks ambulance rushed him to the hospital where, according to the Muncie Morning News, “Drs. Arthur Kemper, Trent and Whitney found it necessary to amputate the arm.” Worl survived and successfully sued the mill for $500 in 1902.
Even with quality care, Whitney Hospital was too small to meet demand by 1900. Muncie doctors, industrialists and politicians began agitating for a large, public hospital.
Nothing happened for several years. Then in 1907, physicians George Andrews and Charles Mix opened the private Home Hospital at the corner of Mulberry and Adams streets. The duo had a falling out in 1910. Mix then established a third private hospital on East Charles. Two years later, Andrews moved Home into the renovated Anthony Homestead on South Mulberry Street. Home Hospital became public in 1919 and served Munsonians until (IU Health) Ball Memorial Hospital opened in 1929.
As for Whitney, it remained a private facility until Emmer died in 1919. That same year, William sold it to John Acton, who intended to modernize the hospital. But the venture failed. Milton Gray bought the building in 1921 and converted it into apartments.
It stayed as such for 80 years. However, as the hospital’s memories faded, residents and neighbors occasionally heard strange, uncanny sounds at night. In 1955, former Old West Ender Alyce Leitshuh recalled to the Evening Press that South Council Street was haunted in her youth. “Everyone knew it … a ghost walked up and down the steps at night.”
Phantoms or not, the building remained occupied (by the living) until about 2000. It was in bad shape then. Muncie’s building commissioner in 2008 told a Star Press reporter that “the building is a fire hazard and a public nuisance.”
The warning proved prophetic. On the night of May 9, 2012, an epic fire destroyed the old Whitney Hospital, incinerating its storied history, along with any ghosts still lingering within.
Chris Flook is a Delaware County Historical Society board member and a senior lecturer of Media at Ball State University.
This article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: ByGone Muncie: The city's first hospital
Local News
