Pewee Valley Hospital & Sanitarium

The Pewee Valley Sanitarium and Hospital traces its origins to 1919, when some Seventh Day Adventist nurses, trained at the Madison College and Sanitarium, established a small treatment center in Louisville. In 1924, the group, headed up by Mr. and Mrs. J.T. Wheeler, purchased a 50-acre farm in Pewee Valley, once owned by the A.W. Kaye family.

The Kaye Years

Louisville Journal advertisement for the John Kaye fruit farm in Pewee Valley.

Dr. A.W. Kaye, from Ice and Refrigeration magazine, Volume 4 (Nickerson & Collins Company, 1893)

Dr. Augustus W. “A.W.” Kaye first moved to Pewee Valley ca. 1870. He may have purchased his Pewee Valley property from his brother, John (1832-1881), who owned a 67.5-acre fruit farm on the Oldham-Jefferson county line during the 1850s.

Augustus and John were sons of William Kaye (February 12, 1801-October 18, 1873) and Margaret Kendrick Kaye (November 17, 1807- November, 1884). Their uncle, Frederick Augustus Kaye, served two, non-consecutive terms as mayor, according to his entry in “The Encyclopedia of Louisville”:

KAYE, FREDERICK AUGUSTUS, JR., (b. Louisville, April 21, 1796; d.Breckinridge County, Kentucky, April 29, 1866) Mayor. The son of Frederick Augustus and Mary Dorothy Kaye, both of Pennsylvania, who had nine children. The Kayes came to Louisville in the late 1700s, purchasing a half-acre of land from Jacob Bucher on March 3, 1789. It is believed that the Kaye family built the first brick house in the city of Louisville that year. It was on Market St. between Fifth and Sixth.

Kaye served as a councilman from the Fourth Ward in 1830, 1831, and 1832 before taking office as mayor on March 15, 1837. In the 1837 election, Kaye, a member of the Whig Party, was chosen by the City Council after a vote was taken thirteen separate times to decide who would serve as mayor.

Kaye was the first to be selected mayor solely by the qualified voters of the city. In 1838, in response to difficulties caused by the selection of the mayor by the City Council, the state legislature amended the city charter to allow for direct popular election. The city charter was also amended to extend the mayor’s term of office

to three years and to prohibit the incumbent from running for reelection. Kaye served until May 17, 1841. After sitting out a term, he was again elected mayor, serving from May 10, 1844 until May 10, 1847. He defeated George B. Didlake, of the pro-slavery Democratic Locofoco Party by a vote of 963 to 338. Turnout was less than two-thirds of eligible voters.

After his tenure as mayor, Kaye was a member of the Board of Aldermen from 1854 until 1856 and was its president in 1855-1856. He married Rachel C. McLaughlin (1802-64) in Louisville. They had six children. Kaye died at his son William’s house. Both Kaye and his wife are buried at Cave Hill Cemetery.

Cave Hill Cemetery was created during Frederick Augustus Kaye’s second mayoral term, according to The Cave Hill Cemetery Historic Bicycle Tour’s website:

In the mid-1830s, meetings about developing a railroad between Louisville and Frankfort prompted city officials to purchase parts of the farm for the expected railroad path. Some of the land was also set aside for burial lots and a workhouse. After the track’s final route bypassed the property, the fields were leased to local farmers, and the brick residence was turned into the city’s pesthouse to accommodate people with contagious diseases.

In 1846 Mayor Frederick Kaye and the City Council appointed a committee to investigate the possibility of developing the grounds as a garden-style cemetery, a concept that was gaining popularity at the time. They hired a civil engineer who convinced the city to build a cemetery using the area’s natural rolling landscape instead of leveling the site for burials. The Methodist (later Eastern) Cemetery located adjacent to Cave Hill on Baxter Ave. had been in use since 1844.

In February 1848 the General Assembly of Kentucky chartered the Cave Hill Cemetery Co., and the city then deeded 50 acres to the corporation. The city retained the land containing the quarries, and pesthouse. The cemetery opened on July 25, 1848. Deadly contagious diseases wreaked havoc throughout the city during this period and the cemetery quickly began accepting it first interments. Increased burials continued into the Civil War, especially after the administrators sold several acres near the workhouse at twenty-five cents per square foot for the burial of fallen Union soldiers. In response several local Confederate supporters purchased land nearby for the burial of downed southerners.

A.W. Kaye with his wife Virginia Nock Kaye. From ancestry.com.

On October 21, 1856, A.W. Kaye married Virginia Nock, daughter of Samuel L. Nock (December 29, 1804-January 24, 1867) and Jane Lawless Beckwith Nock (June 5, 1902-July 12, 1893). They had built the Anchorage, Kentucky Italianate villa “Hazelwood” on the east side of Evergreen Avenue north of the railroad tracks during the early 1850s. The house later became known as Gray Tower and is located at 1401 Elm Road.

Samuel W. Thomas in “The Village of Anchorage” (Anchorage Civic Club: 2004) noted that the Nocks:

…had purchased the land in two tracts on Goose Creek comprising 126 acres at a cost of $35 an acre from Samuel Williams in 1849…The Nocks named heir country estate Hazelwood.

…Samuel L. Nock, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, worked in his father’s soap factory on Second Street until it burned. In 1835, he entered the wholesale grocery business, which flourished until the Civil War. He married the widow of Manassas Beckwith, Jane Lawless Beckwith, who had been raised on Chenoweth Run. The “Memorial History of Louisville” noted that “among other interesting bits of history which she was fond of relating to her family in later years was the story of her acquaintance with a pioneer woman who had been scalped by the Indians in one of their numerous raids into Kentucky, but who recovered from her wound and lived many years. In old age, Mrs. Nock also recalled “as late as 1820, the feminine citizens of Louisville did their shopping at Middletown.”

Samuel L. Nock, Sr., died at Hazelwood early in 1867…Mrs. Nock died in 1898 and both are buried in the Hobbs Cemetery (editor’s note: in Anchorage).

1880 portrait of A.W. and Virginia Kaye's children. From ancestry.com.

The Kayes had ten children, nine of which lived to adulthood:

Arthur W. Kaye (1857–1925)
Jane Kaye (1859–?)
Samuel Kaye (1861–1928)
Robert Kaye (1863-1923)
Irene Kaye (1865-?)
William Kaye (1867-1938)
Augustus Walton Kaye (1870-1940)
Frank J. Kaye (1873-1962)
John Kendrick Kaye (1875-1937)
Herbert Wales Kaye (1878-1878)

The Kaye home served as the nucleus for the hospital. This may be the "new frame house" mentioned in John Kaye's real estate ads in the 1850s.

Although A.W. Kaye was a practicing physician, he had other business interests to help support his large family. The “Louisville Directory and Business Advertiser of 1860” listed him as the owner of a wholesale confectionery at 323 W. Main, where he employed both a salesman and a bookkeeper. The confectionery was just a few doors down from his father-in-law’s wholesale tobacco and grocery business, Nock, Wicks & Co., at 315 & 317 W. Main.

By 1870, A.W. and Virginia had moved to their acreage in Pewee Valley, where A.W. became one of the original supporters and organizers of the Kentucky College for Young Ladies in 1873.

The doctor appears to have had a longstanding interest in horticulture. In 1854, he won prizes for his displays of white free and colored cling peaches at the annual exhibition of the Louisville Horticultural Society at Mozart Hall, according to “The Horticultrual Review and Botanical Magazine”, Volume 4 (Morgan & Overend printers; 1854). He also developed an interest in honeybees and exhibited at the Kentucky State Convention of Beekeepers in 1881.

Five years after his wife's July 12, 1880 death in Pewee Valley, A.W. moved to Mississippi and opened what was to become one of several ice factories. "Ice and Refrigeration" magazine, Volume 4 (Nickerson & Collins Company, 1893) carried a story about his sudden death at his Columbus, Mississippi factory. Although it incorrectly identified him as his son, Samuel, it included many details about A.W.’s life:

(A.W. Kaye), proprietor of the Columbus, Miss., ice factory, dropped dead from heart failure while at his work at the Columbus ice factory on February 23 last. Mr. Kaye, who was one of the well known ice dealers and manufacturers of the South, was born in Louisville, Ky., January 18, 1827. As a youth he studied medicine, graduating in 1848, at the age of twenty-one years. During the California gold excitement he went to the coast in 1849, making the journey by sea, remaining in California and Oregon until 1852, when he returned to Louisville and continued the practice of his profession until the opening of the civil war, during which he served as army surgeon. After the close of the war, he removed to Pewee Valley, where he first began handling ice.

In 1855 he married Miss Virginia L. Nock, to whom a family of nine children were born, seven of whom were boys, all of whom, with the exception of the oldest, Arthur Kaye, of Louisville, are now engaged in the ice trade.

In 1885 he removed to Mississippi and continued in the ice business until his death. His portrait, which we publish herewith, was taken some years ago. It depicts a strong face, and one is not deceived in believing him a strong character and a man highly esteemed wherever he lived.

“Mississippi: Contemporary Biography” (Dunbar Rowland Reprint Company: 1907) included a profile of his son and namesake, Augustus W. Kaye, which provided some additional detail about A.W.’s life:

Kaye, Augustus W., proprietor of the Kaye Steam Bottling Works, of Meridian, in connection with which he conducts a finely equipped natatorium, is one of the representative young business men of this thriving city. Mr.Kaye was born in Anchorage, Jefferson county, Ky., April 8, 1870, and is a son of Augustus W. and Virginia (Nock) Kaye, both of whom were born and reared in Kentucky, where the father was a leading representative of the medical profession. He came to Mississippi in the eighties and here continued in the practice of his profession for a number of years, while he passed the closing years of his life, retired from active labors, in the home of his son Sam, at Columbus, Miss. He died in 1892, his wife having preceded him to the life eternal. Augustus W. Kaye completed his educational discipline in Louisville, Ky., and there he initiated his business career by engaging in the collecting business, while later he was employed as a salesman in a mercantile establishment in Chicago, Ill. In 1894 he located in Tupelo, Miss., where he owned and operated an ice factory and bottling works until 1901, when he located in Meridian and established the Kaye Steam Bottling Works. He has made the enterprise a very prosperous one, and in 1903 he expanded its scope by the construction of a fine public natatorium, the swimming pool being 27x45 feet in dimensions, four feet deep at one end, with a maximum depth of eight feet at the other end. The construction is of cement throughout and this is one of the finest swimming pools in the South, while it receives an appreciative supporting patronage. Mr. Kaye is a stockholder in the Union Bank and Trust Company, and in politics is a Democrat. On June 31, 1898, Mr. Kaye married Miss Eunice A. Williams, daughter of Harrison A. and Emma A. (Harrison) Williams, of Louisville, Ky., where the former died in 1881 and the latter in 1887. He was a lineal descendant of John Adams, second president of the United States, and she was a descendant of Gen. William Henry Harrison. Mr. and Mrs. Kaye are the parents of the following children—Mary, Oliver, Eunice and Augusta.

The old Kaye homestead from Katie S. Smith's "Pewee Valley: Land of the Little Colonel" published in 1974. The Seventh Day Adventists used the homestead as a daycare center for some years after the hospital closed. It was torn down in 2016.

In 1895, after A.W.’s death, the farm was rented for the summer by the Board of Managers for Jennie Casseday’s Rest Cottage for Working Women. The Rest Cottage, which provided an inexpensive place for working women to take a much-need country vacation, was held at various sites in Oldham County for several years, before making another Pewee Valley farm, Beechmore, its permanent home.

When the 1900 census was taken, Dr. Kaye’s oldest son, Arthur, was living on the farm with his wife, Harriet (Daviess) and two daughters, Corrine, age 9, and Virginia, who was just a year old. Mayor Frank Gatchel’s hand-drawn 1907 map of Pewee Valley portrays the Kaye farm as significantly smaller than it was in 1879, when the Beers & Lanagan Atlas of the town was published. The north two-thirds of the property, with access to LaGrange Road and the railroad tracks, was owned by the Irwins. The Kayes retained ownership of the rear portion fronting Old Floydsburg Road. The tract was bifurcated when Old Forrest Road was constructed.

Fittingly enough, given their familial connection, the Kayes are buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, Section 5, Lot 271. Dr. Augustus Kaye was buried in 1893, his son Arthur in 1925, Arthur’s wife Harriet Daviess Kaye in 1952, and Arthur and Hattie’s three children: Corrinne Kaye Crawford in 1947, Clarke in 1987 and Virginia Kaye Norman in 1994. The location of Virginia Nock Kayes’ grave is unknown.

Virginia Kaye, seated on the lap of Rebecca Porter (Mom Beck in the “Little Colonel” stories) played the part of Little Colonel Lloyd Sherman in an official “Little Colonel Series” postcard photo taken by Kate Matthews.

The Seventh Day Adventists Open a Hospital

When the Seventh Day Adventists bought the Kaye place, it included a large, two-story log cabin that was about 100 years old, two tenant houses and a barn. Conditions on the farm were primitive. The cabin had no electric lights and was heated by coal stoves. It was subsequently remodeled to include six patient rooms, treatment rooms and a small operating room. In the fall of 1925, the first patient was admitted and the Pewee Valley Sanitarium & Hospital officially opened its doors. The hospital first specialized in diet, water treatments and service.

The Rev. White was among the Kentucky Confederate Home inmates transferred to live at the Pewee Valley Hospital and Sanitarium when the home closed in 1934. This photo was taken in 1936 in front of the old walkway to the home on Mt. Mercy Avenue.

In 1934, when the Kentucky Confederate Home closed its doors, the five remaining veterans were transferred to the Pewee Valley Sanitarium, which received an annual $800 allowance from the state to care for them.

Four years later, administrator J.T. Wheeler purchased the Confederate Home property from the state for $8,750. Wheeler’s main interest was in the “appurtenances” associated with the property, which included radiators, pipes and bathroom fixtures; a wooden water tank; a steel water tank; two steam boilers and fixtures; and water pumps attached to several miles of pipe to carry water from a spring in O’Bannons, Ky. to the Confederate Home property.

By 1940, the hospital had 40 beds and 22 student nurses in training. In 1950, it was a member of both the American Hospital and Kentucky Hospital associations and had 17 physicians on staff, as well as a chaplain. Twenty-six more beds were added in 1956.

Friendship Manor Nursing Home Opens

In 1968, the hospital started construction of a nursing home facility on their campus. A story about it ran in the July 31, 1968 Courier-Journal:

The Pewee Valley Sanitarium and Hospital has started construction of a 94-bed extended care facility on its property off LaGrange Road.

The new unit will replace a 50-bed facility and will cost an estimated $600,000, Joe Bullock, administrator, said yesterday. Completion is scheduled for next spring, at which time the old unit will be razed.

The hospital, officially the Rural Educational Association of Kentucky, will continue to operate its 25-bed general hospital, including emergency service, obstetrics and outpatient service, Bullock said.

Funds for the new unit will come from a bond issue by a Nashville, Tenn., firm. The hospital must raise $50,000 through local contributions.

The new unit will be a one-story complex containing a laundry, kitchen, and a special area for ambulatory senile patients, Bullock said.

Pewee Valley Hospital was established in 1924 in a rural area northeast of Louisville. A group of nurses bought 40 acres of land and began work in several farm buildings.

Now a group of 10 physicians serve Pewee Valley and the surrounding area. In 1966, the hospital and extended-care unit accounted for 23,926 patient days.

The new nursing home opened in May 1969.

From "A Place Called Pewee Valley," published in 1970 by the Pewee Valley Centennial Committee. The 25-bed hospital was located at the back of the property on the right. A large addition was made to the original building. The nursing home, which operates as Friendship Manor today, is in the foreground on the left.

Hospital Closes in 1975

By the early 1970s, the 25-bed general hospital was facing major financial woes as patients in the area increasingly availed themselves to newer, larger and better-equipped facilities in nearby Louisville. A story about its imminent closure ran in the November 5, 1971 Courier-Journal:

The 25-bed Pewee Valley Hospital in Oldham County is closing.

Joe Butterfield, the hospital's administrator, said yesterday the institution's board voted Tuesday to close it because of financial difficulty. The closing will probably take place before Christmas, he said.

"It seems we've been going down and down for a several years," Butterfield explained.

"Last year we had to put in a sprinkler system to keep up with Medicare standards. Now we're faced with a $3,000 expense for an X-ray machine that has broken down, and we need a new heating system," he said.

A $150,000 accumulated debt played a large part in the board's decision to shut down the facility.

Friendship Manor, an associated nursing home with room for 94 residents, will continue in operation. But Oldham residents who need general hospital care will need to go elsewhere.

Butterfield said that would probably mean the Mallory Taylor Hospital in LaGrange or one of Louisville's hospitals.

Pewee Valley is a Louisville suburb located just over the northeast Jefferson County line.

The eight doctors on staff have already been asked to start looking for someplace else to send their patients.

Provides Full Range of Services
Most of the physicians already have privileges in Louisville hospitals, according to Butterfield, and several can work out of the LaGrange facility.

"But the closing will be considerably inconvenient for them." the administrator said, adding that the doctors are complaining about the loss of the Pewee Valley Hospital.

Community sentiment is also being voice in favor of keeping the hospital.

"It's felt that it would hurt the community desperately not to have some sort of medical facility here," Butterfield said.

The hospital provides full medical services.

A routine surgery schedule yesterday included three operations, and 75 to 80 babies are delivered in the hospital each year.

A full-time physical therapy program is maintained, and the hospital has participated in Medicare and Medicaid programs.

In addition to forfeiting the community services, the hospital will have to give up some its 25 employees.

"We'll try to place the ones we can in the nursing home," Butterfield said. "But naturally a good number of people will have to find work elsewhere."

The hospital officials are unsure what to do about the hospital building -- an aging frame structure.

The sprnkler system that was installed last year cost $20,000, and the board doesn't want to see the building simply torn down after the recent investment.

"We hope to get a license to be a personal care or nursing home," Butterfield said. "But we're probably not up to standards for that."

Parts of the building date to the founding of the hospital in 1924 and there had been no construction since the early 1950s.

In fact, after money to pay expenses and to retire the debt -- the greatest need is for a building program, Butterfield said.

He believes the hospital is tantalizingly close to having enough money to meet its obligations and keep going.

The 25-bed hospital averages only 17 patients, he explained, yet an average of 20 patients would provide the needed finances. Income from each full used hospital bed averages $13,687 a year, he said.

But Butterfield sees little hope of convincing the board that the money will be forthcoming.

He said officials had been hoping the population of Oldham and nearby Jefferson County would expand sufficiently to guarantee the needed support. But the financial crunch is coming before the hoped-for expansion.

Perhaps the day of a 25-bed hospital this close to a metropolitan area has come to an end," the administrator said. "But there is a real need for it."

1974 Photos from "Pewee Valley: Land of the Little Colonel"

The hospital reversed its position a month later, thanks to an outpouring of financial support from residents, staff physicians and local businesses. The December 2, 1971 Courier-Journal reported:

... since the announcement of the intention to close, donations have started pouring in from citizens, church groups and the medical community.

"We can buy a year's time for $25.000, and it looks like we will make it," said W. Joe Butterfield, Pewee Valley Hospital's administrator.

In addition, the patient census is up from an average of 17 to 10 ...

Donations by several physicians, including Dr. John H. Leland, a Crestwood general practitioner, have helped considerable. Leland has offered to donate a day's receipts from his practice each month until the hospital is back on a sound financial footing.

"We can hardly afford to lose this hospital," Dr. Leland explained. "Patients receive excellent medical care, and the recovery rate of heart patients is as good or better than most hospitals," he said.

Butterfield believes that recent publicity describing the Pewee Valley Hospital as a general hospital with full medical services, including surgery, may have helped increase admissions ...

...One of Pewee Valley's patients has been there 38 years this month.

The woman, now 65, entered the hospital in 1933. A lump sum of $5,000 was paid for her care and board as long as she lived, Butterfield said.

"In those days, that sum appeared adequate," he said.

That cash infusion kept the hospital afloat a few more years. The May 1974 Call of the Pewee carried a glowing report on the hospital's scope of services as it reached its 50th year:

... Mr. Joe Butterfield and Mrs. Beth Pearman are administrator for the hospital and nursing home, respectively. The medical complex employs a total of 100 persons. The Hospital offers complete services including a modern operating room, In-house laboratory, X-ray facility, and emergency room service. They have recently added the capability of emergency surgery. they also offer Total EKG service. The EKG is taken in the usual manner, transmitted by telephone to a group of Heart Specialists in Chicago, who interpret the graph and submit their findings back to the hospital by teletype. The new procedure has greatly increased the hospital's capability for providing rapid interpretation and diagnosis for suspected heart problems...

The Hospital is staffed by Drs. Cable Liem, Shirley Liem, John Leland, T.J. Smith, H. Burl Mack, Harold Funke and James F. Kurfees. Mr. John Liem, RPT provides full time physical therapy for those requiring it.

The hospital is particularly proud of their new anesthesiology machine which was purchased by money donated by local residents and businessmen during a recent fund drive...

Despite the many improvements in services and staffing, however, the hospital couldn't make it financially and shut down in 1975. According to the “History of the Pewee Valley Church of Seventh Day Adventists:”

... Health care was becoming big business and more complicated in their operations. Smaller hospitals found it more and more difficult to compete with larger institutions, with their newer and more expensive and sophisticated equipment and facilities, together with their expanding staffs of specialty-trained physicians and other medical personnel, now within easy access…On March 15, (1975), the struggling little Pewee Valley Hospital, founded and nourished with so much “blood, sweat and tears” was forced to close its doors.

Photos from the May 1974 Call of the Pewee

Pewee Valley Hospital Administrators 1925-1975

The Campbells pose in front of Pewee Valley Hospital. Photo ca. 1940s.

J.T. Wheeler 1925-1943

L.A. Butterfield 1943-1945

A.A. Davis 1945-1952

P.C. Dysinger 1952-1957

Charles P. Harris, Jr. 1955-1964 (1955-61 as associate administrator)

Paul C. Dysinger 1964-1968

John Bullock 1964-1968 (associate administrator 2 years)

Bob Walper 1968-1970 (associate administrator)

Joe Butterfield 1970-1974

Dr. John Leland 1974-1975 (acting administrator)

The nursing home continues to operate on the property today.

Burning Down the Old Hospital, Photos Courtesy of the Pewee Valley Fire Department, Date Unknown