St. Peter's Hospital

The facility opened on January 20, 1876, in two rented rooms of an East Seventh Street house near College Street. It is believed that this nascent facility was North Carolina’s first non-military hospital. By mid-1876, the facility – initially known as the Charlotte Home and Hospital – moved to new temporary quarters on North Tryon Street, where the former First Baptist Church (now Spirit Square) is now located. The following year, property at the corner of Sixth Street and Cemetery Avenue (now Poplar Street) was purchased to become the permanent site for the Charlotte Home and Hospital. The bricks for the new building, originally a one-story edifice measuring 30x30 feet with four rooms, were made at the present site of the Thompson Orphanage Chapel. The hospital opened at its permanent location on May 30, 1878, due in large part to the Busy Bee Society, a student organization at a local female academy run by Miss Hattie Moore (1825-1910). The young women raised money to purchase the lot ($273.42) and fund much of the building’s construction. An 1882 two-story addition measuring 34x30 feet expanded the facility to ten rooms. 

The Charlotte Home and Hospital was the city’s only hospital until the 1888 opening of Good Samaritan Hospital, a facility serving Black Charlotteans that was also founded by the St. Peter’s congregation and spearheaded by Jane Wilkes. Presbyterian Hospital opened in a converted hotel on West Trade Street in 1903, followed by Mercy General Hospital three years later on East First Street. By the late 1890s, the Charlotte Home and Hospital was a major medical center, where many of the advanced surgical techniques of that day were first practiced in Charlotte. Serving patients throughout the Piedmont, the hospital warranted a major three-story, thirty-room addition in 1898. The expanded complex also received a new name: St. Peter’s Hospital. Further additions to the hospital were completed in 1907 (a three-story, thirty-room wing) and 1922 (including a nurses’ home, maternity ward, children’s ward, baby’s ward, a larger charity ward, and extensive renovations to the existing facilities). Additional work was completed in 1935, consisting primarily of improvements and repairs to the existing medical complex and its equipment, because the hospital’s property no longer had room for further expansion. 

A 1938 report surveying Charlotte’s medical facilities prompted citizens to launch a drive to establish a new hospital. In response, the St. Peter’s Hospital board of trustees voted to contribute $100,000 to that campaign and to close St. Peter’s upon completion of the new complex. Memorial Hospital opened in October 1940 and received the existing patients of St. Peter’s Hospital. The complex was transformed into the Kenmore Hotel that rented several apartments and over eighty rooms to tenants for almost four decades. In 1980, the property was converted into the 36-unit “St. Peter’s Condominiums.”