St. Francis Hospital

Shortly after their arrival in Maryville in 1894, the Sisters of St. Francis opened a hospital in a renovated building, but it was too small to serve the growing community. In September of the same year, they made plans to build a new hospital, and the sisters started collecting funds through donations. John Walsh from Kansas City was hired to draw up plans for the new hospital, and property was  bought on March 18, 1895. When it was close to being done later that year, the sisters collected more donations to buy furniture and equipment. Initially called St. Joseph Hospital, the sisters changed the name after just a few years due to confusion between it and the hospital in St. Joseph, Missouri. They renamed the hospital St. Francis.

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​The new hospital opened on November 26, 1895. The sisters worked at the hospital, but they also had eight local physicians who also worked there. The price for treatments was determined to be $5 to $12 per weekly treatment and $1 or $2 for daily treatment. However, not all patients could fully pay for their treatments. Because the sisters saw these services as important  community work, they would write “ODL” or “Our Dear Lord” in the ledger when a patient could not pay. The sisters used their religious work to cover these costs.

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By 1908 the original brick and mortar building had received two separate wing additions and an extension for a nurse training school. After this, the sisters began building training schools for nurses all over the nation in Missouri, Oklahoma, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, and North Carolina. In total, eleven schools would be built that educated nurses of clerical and secular background.

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The motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Francis formally left the hospital in 1948, moving to the convent at Mt. Alverno. The order still owned the hospital property despite administration passing over to lay-people in 1965, which is why it kept its namesake. Shortly thereafter, plans for a new modern hospital were put in place, and in 1970 a new site opened for the public at its current address at 2016 S. Main Street in Maryville, Missouri.

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Many of the sisters stayed and worked at the hospital until they left the order, rejoined the motherhouse at Mt. Alverno, or until the end of their days. ​In 2019 the hospital was sold to Mosaic Life Care, thus ending the more than 100 year connection that the Maryville hospital had to the Catholic Church.