Good Samaritan Hospital Chapel
(ca. early 1900s)
A small chapel is all that remains of Good Samaritan Hospital, the final surviving remnant of Charlotte’s a once-flourishing Third Ward Black community.
401 S Tryon St, Charlotte, NC 28202
The founding of the Good Samaritan Hospital was rooted in the philosophy of the Episcopal Church and the determined efforts of a remarkable St. Peter’s Episcopal Church parishioner, Jane Renwick Smedberg Wilkes (1827-1913). A five-year fundraising campaign led by Wilkes culminated in the 1887 purchase of land for the new hospital on the south side of Hill Street between Mint and Graham Streets, adjacent to the St. Michael and All Angels mission church newly launched for Black Charlotteans by the North Carolina Episcopal Diocese. Although construction proceeded slowly due to available funds, the hospital finally opened at 411 West Hill Street in September 1891.
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Born in New York City to Swedish industrialist Charles Gustav Smedberg and Isabella Renwick, Jane Wilkes often enjoyed the company of her first cousin and schoolmate, John Wilkes (1827-1908). He was the son of U.S. Navy Admiral Charles Wilkes, who established the U.S. Naval Observatory (1833) and undertook the first U.S. expedition in the South Pacific and Antarctica (1838). Like his father, John Wilkes entered the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating number one in his class. After naval service in the Gulf of Mexico and the Far East, Wilkes returned to the United States in 1852. He came to Charlotte in 1853 while on leave to look into business possibilities. The following year he married his cousin Jane and resigned his commission. The newlyweds took up permanent residence in Charlotte.
Good Samaritan is believed to have been North Carolina’s first privately funded independent hospital built exclusively for the treatment of Black patients, a unique distinction given that Charlotte was then only the third largest city in the state (behind Wilmington and Raleigh). By 1929, the American Medical Association identified Good Samaritan as one of the oldest Black hospitals then in operation in the entire United States. It is also notable that governance of the hospital was vested in a board of managers comprised solely of female members of St. Peter’s Church.
Originally styled as a Richardsonian Romanesque structure, the building went through several upgrades over time, the first – a matching rear addition featuring a small chapel – was completed between 1902 and 1909. The facility’s capacity was doubled in 1925 and expanded again in 1937 to a 100-bed hospital with the latest equipment, 22 nurses, and patients from most of the city’s doctors. But by the early 1950s, the facilities and staffing could not maintain the necessary pace of innovation, as the small St. Peter’s Church found it increasingly difficult to support a modern hospital. In 1959, Charlotte’s Memorial Hospital agreed to take over Good Samaritan’s operations. Ownership of the site formally passed to the city in 1961, and the facility was renamed Charlotte Community Hospital. It remained in operation until 1982 and was thereafter used as the Magnolias Rest Home.
Until 1996, Good Samaritan Hospital survived as the last surviving remnant of a once-flourishing Black community in Charlotte’s Third Ward neighborhood. A historical marker on South Graham Street commemorates the hospital, which was demolished to make room for Bank of America Stadium. The fixtures of the hospital’s early 1900 chapel, among the hospital’s few known surviving artifacts, are part of the archival collection of the Levine Museum of the New South.