March 28, 2008

• Old Buildings

  We live in an old building. It has been in our family for many many years. My great grandparents lived in this house until they moved across the street when my grandparents moved in as a young married couple. My father was raised in this house along with his two sisters. My grandparents raised me in this house.
  
  This is a picture of the house when my dad was little.
  
  This is what the house looks like now. Aluminum siding was added before I was born and the back porch was added in the 1970s
  
  
  
  This used to be a Gerber clothing factory, back when Gerber made clothing (not sure if they do anymore). It is now Ephrata Christian Fellowship Church (Charity). It is nice to see it used for something like that. It sat with out being filled for too many years. It is also nice that they used the existing building and didn’t tear it down.
  
   
  The old Hospital and before that Mountain Springs Hotel. Sad to say much of this was torn down.
  The original structure on the property is called the Konigmacher
  mansion, and was built in 1848 as a resort.
  At its height, the hotel
  drew more important guests including nineteenth century presidents (including President James Buchanan) and numerous
  other figures of national and statewide influence. The hotel was listed in the
  National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
  The property was bought from Mr. Von Nieda in the mid-1930s by a
  group of “Spiritualists” called Camp Silver Belle, with the intention of
  creating a hospital. 
  

  Then, on June 20,
  1937, the Silver Belle publication Spiritual Truth announced that the Camp was
  establishing the Stephan Memorial Hospital at the old Mountain Springs Hotel.
  The group was dedicating the hospital to the Stephans, who had since died. The
  hospital occupied that portion of the hotel known as the mansion, once the
  residence of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Von Neida, who had operated the resort before
  its sale to the spiritualists, who actually manned the newly set up hospital.
  The place was supervised by Mr. Henry Munch, with Mrs. Munch as assistant and
  director of nursing. At the dedication the nursing staff consisted of Laura
  Shirk of Ephrata and Mary Einwechter of Audubon, New Jersey. The hospital was
  declared a non-profit organization, all monies accrued beyond actual running
  expenses to be put back into the institution in the form of buildings and
  equipment. Future plans in 1937 called for a hospital of brick or concrete block
  facing Spring Garden Street.

  On May 31, 1940 the
  Court of Common Pleas in Lancaster granted a charter to the institution to be
  named the Ephrata Community Hospital.

  In this first
  Ephrata Community Hospital, still in the buildings of the old Mountain Springs
  Hotel, the physical arrangement was as follows: the administration office was
  located in the west side of the building facing town, overlooking the park-like
  lawn fronting it. The space was enlarged soon after Dr. Riffert arrived by
  enclosing a porch. Next to this space, really a part of it, was Dr. Riffert’s
  very small office and examining room. In this cramped office Miss Ethel Pepple,
  R.N. worked with patients’ accounts. This was also her director of nurses’
  office. She was also anesthetist, laboratory technician (before the arrival of
  Grettle Hirshfield, who, incidentally, had received her early technical training
  in a hospital in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany), and X-ray technician.

  The operating room
  was to the rear of this old building, near the entrance for incoming ambulance
  patients. Through its door came patients, doctors, and anyone else who worked or
  had business in the hospital, as well as supplies. The small emergency room was
  really adjacent to the operating room, almost a part of it, so that any patient
  coming in for emergency medical or surgical treatment was actually seen in the
  environs of the O.R. A curving driveway led from Spring Garden Street, behind
  the building, around to this doorway. A short distance beyond the door a hallway
  led past an autoclaving and sterilizing room to the kitchen.

  The building was
  heated by a coal furnace almost directly beneath the O.R. and kitchen. In the
  floor of the hall leading past the sterilizing equipment was a trap-door, fairly
  close to the outside door. When coal was to be delivered the truck would drive
  up and the outside door would be opened and then the trap-door. Coal would then
  be chuted to the cellar. One can imagine the problems involved in keeping those
  vital areas clean.

  Mr. Walter A.
  Fabian was janitor, maintenance engineer, errand man-a man of all jobs. He was a
  thoroughly energetic worker and helper, even carrying around litters to the O.R.,
  up and down stairs, etc. He also did the laundry in the cellar. Fabian, a member
  of the spiritualist group, lived in hotel property in a house behind the
  hospital. Mrs. Fabian was a reader for the spiritualists and a medium.

  Surgical patients often walked to the O.R., were wheeled partway through narrow
  doors and hallways, or were carried on litters. Patients returned to their beds
  after surgery in a like manner. Caesarian section patients had to be carried
  upstairs by the doctors in attendance, nurses, and Walter Fabian. The stairs
  were narrow and cramped. There was no elevator.

  On the first floor
  there were about ten surgical and medical beds, including one three-bed ward,
  whose furnishings incidentally cost $486.75, according to information on the
  early expenses of the hospital. Four to six obstetric patients were accommodated
  on the second floor in small rooms with narrow doorways and corridors. The
  delivery room was also upstairs, of course, small and cramped, with the
  scrub-sink right next to the delivery table. A small eight-crib nursery
  (bassinets) was off the hall to the delivery room, a nursery that was full most
  of the time. Through its windows proud fathers, among whom I number myself,
  first gazed on their children. My daughter was born in this hospital. Her
  mother, and the other women so confined, were constantly in fear of the old
  building’s catching fire, for the means of exit were at best inadequate. The new
  mothers were kept in bed after delivery routinely from nine to ten days, after
  which they were permitted to walk down the long narrow corridor past the nursery
  to the toilet. But some had grown so weak after the long time spent in bed that
  they fainted on the way. Even in totally normal, uncomplicated deliveries
  obstetric patients were usually kept in the hospital two weeks before being
  discharged.

  The hospital’s
  other facilities were adequate, considering its size. The X-ray room, whose
  equipment had cost $3,511.63, and a laboratory were on the first floor. Also on
  that floor was room with a fracture bed, which had cost $462.20. The kitchen had
  been outfitted for $421 .00 and the laundry for $161.00. The ambulance was
  supplied and kept in service by the local American Legion, Post 429, a service
  continued until about 1960.
  

  
  By 1947 the need for new hospital beds was critical, although the 16-bed
  hospital on Main Street continued to serve the community. Between May 1946 and
  May 1947 the hospital cared for 58 medical, 414 surgical, 280 obstetrical, and
  267 newborn patients.
  By July a site for the new building in the Arlington section of Ephrata had been
  chosen and the plot had been bought for $12,350.

  On November 6, 1949, the front door was officially unlocked by Burgess David E.
  Good, who with Rev. Andre made the formal dedication. A large crowd, about a
  thousand people, attended. Pastor Myron Eichner offered a prayer and the
  benediction. The program was arranged by a committee headed by R. U. Fasnacht.
  Ray Numbers, of the Amvets Post, and Mr. Ivan Mentzer raised a flag presented in
  honor of the board member Harry Coover, who had recently died. The flagpole
  itself was presented by the Amvets Auxiliary.

  Transfer of patients from the old hospital to the new began on the following day
  and was completed two days later.

  Local historian Clarence Spohn of the Historical Society of the
  Cocalico Valley said seances were held years later in certain rooms.
  Guests swore they made spiritual contact with deceased presidents
  Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
  
  My Aunt was born there.
  My husband was taken there as a child back when it was taken over by witches and mediums as his mom was into that stuff.

  This is what is there now
  
  
  They tore most of the Mount Springs Hotel / Old Ephrata Hospital down a few years ago. Wonder if people think the new building is haunted too as it is where the old one was. (I don’t believe in ghosts. I believe in  demons acting like they are ghosts)
  
  

  
   The
  Burkholder Building.
  George Wise added a three-story brick addition in
  the 1870′s to his residence at 105 East Main Street, which became
  107-109. He operated a brickyard and was responsible for many of the
  brick buildings on Main Street.
  What’s There Now: Jackson Hewitt Tax Service
  
  

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