'A preservation miracle': Restoration of historical Fort Gratiot Hospital finally complete

From the outside, the years-long preservation of the historical Fort Gratiot Hospital may have looked done, but organizers said final interior details only came together within the last year.

And now, there’s plenty of history to celebrate.

A largely volunteer-driven effort that’s spanned a few decades, the museum structure once belonged to the Fort Gratiot military site before it was split and moved, remaining for decades as private homes, after the fort was decommissioned in 1879.

Steadily in the years since those structures were rediscovered, the restoration of the old hospital has gained steam on site a stone’s throw from the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse — a St. Clair County park site and Port Huron Museum facilities — with a boost in COVID stimulus funds through the county last year to help finish the hospital’s interior.

By January this year, Veronica Campbell, executive director for the Port Huron Museums, said “the biggest push” was the interior.

“It’s always been included in the lighthouse tours, but this time, it’s finished. So, people can come in and explore this on their own,” she said during a tour on Friday.

Crediting the committee steering a lot of the revitalization, Campbell and Kayla Wendt, the museums’ curator of collections and exhibits, gave a brief overview of the layout and contents of the site. A few days before, they’d celebrated the completion of the restoration of the site with a community ribbon cutting.

“People walk in, and they don’t recognize the place. I think it was Lauren who said this is a preservation miracle,” Campbell said, referring to Lauren Nelson, the Fort Gratiot Light Station lead and museum store manager. “Because it took so long and there were just people who were passionate about making sure this building was saved. So, to have this be at the finish line, to be done, it’s just an amazing experience for everybody who’s been involved over the years.”

Now, the completed hospital, though combined, still serves a split purpose on display — one side where hospital beds once were with a mock bed constructed from beams original to the structure, and the other dedicated to the medical history of the fort’s era and the archaeological work precipitating the restoration.

“We really wanted to focus on the military and the medical history. Those are kind of the two sides of things,” Wendt said. “Pretty much all of the artifacts here are from our collection. We had to outsource a couple of things like uniforms and things like that.”

The south side shows displays about soldiers and people who likely inhabited the fort with silhouettes of what that may have looked like projected on the wall opposite a large flag last flown over the fort.

Campbell said the latter was her favorite piece, adding, “We’re just really lucky to have that.”

On the medical side, a local physician’s tools are displayed on the wall with more information on how people were treated. Wendt referenced the doctor’s toolkit, his penchant for avoiding amputations, and the science of the time amidst the emergence of germ theory.

The center hallway was rebuilt and houses display photos of the fort blown up from early negatives. However, the flooring on either side appears aged and more obviously from the 19 ^th century.

There’s also an area of the interior wall left open and free of modern drywall to show visitors what the original building’s construction looked like.

“It’s the oldest wooden structure in St. Clair County, so it’s pretty amazing that it made it this far. And it’s all completed and done,” Wendt said. “I think the medical side of it is really fascinating. We don’t have a lot of space for that at our sites right now. This is such the logical space for all the medical history in the county.”

The Fort Gratiot Hospital is part of the light station tour, which along with climbing the lighthouse, does require an admission cost. Admission to the light station park, which is open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., is free. The lighthouse museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through Sept. 15 with final tours beginning at 4 p.m. The museum store closes at 5 p.m.

For more information, visit PHMuseum.org or St. Clair County Parks and Rec at www.stclaircounty.org/Offices/178 .

Contact reporter Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com .

This article originally appeared on Port Huron Times Herald: 'A preservation miracle': Restoration of historical Fort Gratiot Hospital finally complete