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1910’s – Shawano’s first hospital at 331 S. Main Street
Shawano’s first hospital at 331 S. Main Street
2023 – Shawano’s first hospital at 331 S. Main Street
2024 – Shawano’s first hospital at 331 S. Main Street being remodeled
A Brief History
Shawano First Hospital
331 S. Main St.
Shawano, WI
We are so happy to see the historic property at 331 S. Main Street in Shawano being restored. The house on this property was the first hospital in Shawano! Over the years it fell into disrepair and we were concerned it would be demolished. The owner is now renovating the house and property. Listed below is a short history of the first hospital with photos of the house through the years. The photos show the property over the years from 1910 to today.
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Imagine…. it’s 1910 in Shawano and the population is nearing 3,000. Just like today, with mills, factories, and logging, there were accidents, not to mention health emergencies and sickness that happens in everyday life. There’s no hospital! So, what do you do if you needed medical attention? You could take the train and head for Green Bay or try to find a doctor and make-do on your own.
Until 1910 when Dr. Stubenvoll opened the first practical hospital in Shawano, these were the alternatives you faced. In 1910, Dr. Carl B. Stubenvoll leased the Edgar Reed house at 331 S. Main Street in Shawano and remodeled the house into a “hospital.” It had two wards with six beds and six private rooms. The beds available for patients were filled most of the time.
The hospital was a decided success from the standpoint of the good it did, but it was a money-loser from the beginning. Dr. Stubenvoll stood the expense alone, without any community help, and gave this community a hospital which will always be to his credit for the wonderful unselfish service he gave.
The hospital, aside from not being fireproof, was just as modern as could be made. The operating room was fitted with the best equipment, the rooms were clean and well furnished, and the service was of the best.
The hospital took care of 1,600 patients and some remarkable recoveries were made at the institution.
Five lives were saved, positively, which would have been lost were it not for the hospital. Many emergency cases from the woods, mills and factories were cared for in this hospital with excellent results, but those five were positively savers of life, and without any question whatever, those five persons would be dead today were it not for the Stubenvoll hospital.
Three of them are prominent Shawano citizens, and the other two live in the county. One of the men was on his way to Green Bay and the train men saw he was going to die and would never get to his destination alive. He was taken off the train, brought to the hospital and was saved. The other four were just as clearly life-saving cases.
Among the head nurses were Dorothy Minsart, who was a Red Cross Nurse during the war and who married and now lived in Chicago. Emma Ecke, now married and living in Chicago; Miss Gerhardt, later Mrs. Mathwig living in Cleveland, Ohio; Amy Amundson, now Mrs. Robert Mittlestadt, of Shawano; and Mrs. Nelson of Clintonville.
Dr. Stubenvoll lost many thousands of dollars in the nine years his hospital was operated, but he did an untold amount of good, and surely will have credit where the books of credit of life are kept.
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Dr. Carl B. Stubenvoll had a medical practice in Shawano from 1908-1945.
In 1868 Carl B. Stubenvoll was born in Baden, Germany. He graduated from Heidelburg University and came to America in 1892. He attended college in Chicago and first practiced medicine in Racine, Wisconsin.
He married Caroline Rodenbeck of Rachine and they ad two sons and two daughters. He practiced in both Oshkosh and Tigerton before coming to Shawano in 1908. He had a large practice with his office over the Naber Drug Store. Dr. Stubenvoll started the first small hospital in Shawano which he ran for several years. Dr. Stubenvoll practiced medicine in Shawano for 38 years until his death in 1946.