(Note: The following is part of a series of columns looking at the establishment and growth of doctors, hospitals and the health industry in Georgia and Bulloch County.)

    After the Marine Hospital Service Act was signed into law by President John Adams in 1798, Savannah opened the Forest City Marine Hospital in 1804 for both sick seamen and the city’s poor.
    The hospital, which was operated by the Marine Hospital Service, was funded by a tax of 20 cents taken from each seaman’s monthly earnings and placed in the Marine Hospital Fund.
    After being reincorporated in 1808 as the Savannah Poor House and Hospital Society, the hospital moved to new quarters on Gaston Street in 1819. It was now funded by the city’s “Poor Tax.”
    Serving first as a Confederate and then a Union army hospital, it was renamed the Savannah Hospital in 1872. This hospital moved into new facilities on York and Drayton Streets in 1905.
    In 1930, it became Candler Hospital after being purchased by the Methodist Church. Georgia's first real public hospital, it is the nation’s second-oldest, continuously operated hospital.
    After the Forest City Marine Hospital re-established itself in a building on the corners of East Broad and Gordon Streets, the Catholic Sisters of Mercy took over the operation of the Marine Hospital in 1878.
    Hospital Superintendent Sister M. Cecilia Carroll moved the facility to the Orphan Boys House in the old Georgia Medical College building on Habersham and Taylor Streets.
    The sisters renamed the facility Saint Joseph’s Infirmary. A dedicated Marine Hospital Ward was operated at Saint Joseph’s Infirmary and then Hospital for the next 30 years.
    As for a military hospital, General Fitzhugh Lee, commander of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Corps, ordered the construction of some
49 hospital buildings in Savannah’s Ardsley Park area in 1898.
    Lee’s 13 regiments and two artillery battalions, numbering some 13,000 men, had invaded Savannah as they awaited transport to fight in the Spanish-American War.
    Formally referred to as the Army Medical Hospital and Supply Depot, the compound was “a structure of 40 pavilions and (contained) 1,000 to 1,500 beds.”
    General Lee, however, set up his own personal quarters in the Hotel DeSoto, using the Banquet Room as his official Headquarters. President McKinley came to see Lee and his troops off as they sailed for Cuba.
   
    Roger Allen is a local lover of history. Allen provides a brief look each week at the area's past. Email Roger at rwasr1953@gmail.com.