[1882 - The town of Kingman was established at an elevation of 3300 feet. It was northwest of the fifty mile long Hualapai Mountains and just to the southeast of the Cerbat Mountains, east of Beale's Springs. Kingman's origin was as a simple railroad siding in the Middleton Section along the newly constructed route of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. The numerous mines -- principally silver, gold, lead, and copper -- in the area were the reason for the siding. The Springs were one of the first sources of the town's water. (Six more counties had been established in the Arizona Territory by this time.)

November 5: The Mohave County Miner was established as the official newspaper of Mohave County in the county seat of Mineral Park, about 6 miles south of the silver mining town of Chloride and 20 miles northwest of Kingman on the west side of the Cerbat Mountains.]

[1883 - February: The 'Steen House' near the Keystone Mine in Mineral Park was purchased for $111.11 in warrants on the General Fund so the structure could be used for County Hospital purposes.

March: A post office was established in Kingman and the first train pulled into town by month's end. The first depot was a boxcar. Railroad engineers laid out wide streets in the area to allow passage of buckboards and the long line mule teams hauling heavy ore wagons.]

[1908 - May: For $2,000 the County purchased the Beale's Springs ranch which had recently had its mortgage foreclosed. The property was to be used "for care of the indigents of the County, sick and well admitted to the County hospital and poor farm including medicine, attendance, food, lodging and other supplies necessary for their maintenance in a manner satisfactory to said Board of Supervisors."

September: "…the board of supervisors let the contract for hospital buildings to J. N. Cohenour for the sum of $3,579, being the lowest bid received. Mr. Cohenour will commence work on [repairing] the buildings at once."]

[1910 - Mohave County pop.: 3,773 ; Kingman pop.: 900 (voting precinct). Most people in town dug or drilled their own wells and, due to all the breezes in the area, had windmills for pumping the water. Kingman was called the "City of Windmills" for many years around this time. And between 1881 and this year, some twenty doctors recorded their diplomas in the county. Children died of communicable diseases like diptheria and whooping cough. Dysentery was a great killer. Death also led to many second marriages. Men were killed in accidents; wives died in childbirth. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were also rampant.

March: "Quite a number of patients are now in the county hospital. Last week there was thirteen in all and more are being added daily. The place is under the management of George Atmore and is kept in the best possible shape. Trees are being set out around the hospital ground and garden truck has been planted in the lower part of the ground. Before summer is over the place will present a most pleasing picture. Supervisor Potts is taking a great interest in the beautifying of the county farm and it will not be long until he has it one of the model farms of the southwest."

August: "It is being reported that the big stone building now being erected on Pine street by James Pendegast will be opened as a sanitarium when completed."

Also, early this month, Amy Cornwall Neal boarded the train in Kingman for the 350-mile journey to Los Angeles to give birth to her first son, John Leonard, six weeks later. She had travelled for two days by pack mule from Burro Creek Ranch to the Big Sandy Wash (near present day Wikieup), and then three days in wagon to Kingman. As this town did not have adequate hospital facilities at the time, she and husband John elected to have their baby born at the Queen of Angels Hospital, attended by a doctor, a practically unheard of innovation in that age of home-births and midwives. (Four years later the couple's second son would be born at the small hospital in Prescott. Otherwise, most of the accidents and illnesses around the various ranches were handled with a mixture of basic first aid, common sense and a reliance on the body's own ability to heal itself. "You got better or you didn't get better.") (see also 1933)]

[1916 - January: The Kingman Hospital opened in the Pendergast Building for admission of medical, surgical and obstetric cases. Only cases of pulmonary tuberculosis and contagious disease would be excluded. Private rooms were priced at $25 and $28 per week; ward admissions, $18 and $20 per week. Drs. Bucher and Tilton had rented the building by early October 1914 and then equipped it for hospital purposes. Miss Katherine M. Teale, R.N. was listed as the Superintendent.

(There is conflicting information at this point regarding this facility. According to Terry Organ's article "Caring," "A Mohave County Miner advertisement from Jan. 23, 1915 announced the opening of Kingman Hospital in the Pendergast Building. That building at Third and Spring [sic], later became the Greystone Inn where St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church is located today." Per the caption for the Geystone Inn photo in that article, "This private hospital served patients from 1910 to 1915, according to the Mohave Museum of History and Arts.")

Dr. W.H. Bucher, a prominent local physician and surgeon, had been working for the establishment of a hospital for some time. He continued to do so after Pendergast opened and interested the Catholic Sisters of Phoenix to come to Kingman to study the situation with a view to establishing a hospital that will meet the needs of the entire county. The Sisters' proficiency in caring for the sick had been demonstrated in all parts of the world. It was strongly felt that the need for an up-to-date hospital building equipped comparably to that of hospitals in larger cities should be filled, no matter under whose supervision it was conducted. While all the people of Mohave County would benefit, the officials of the innumerable mining companies operating in the various sections of the county would be most supportive for a central place where injured workmen could be given proper and immediate medical attention and care. (Several mining companies did maintain small "hospitals" for the care of injured or sick employees. These were basically no more than emergency buildings near the mines.) The Miner's publisher, Anson H. Smith, announced that he would give a large site, as well as building rock, gravel, and sand for the erection of the hospital.

Minnie Gulley

© Mohave Museum of History and Arts. Reprinted by permission.

Also this year (1916), August 19: what is more commonly known as the first hospital in Kingman was opened by Minnie E. Gulley in the O.E. Walker House (906 Madison Street). Gulley had received her Certificate of Nursing that February from the Chautauqua School of Nursing in New York. At the corner of Mohave Avenue two blocks south of the railroad, the structure had been built the previous year and was being leased to Mrs. Gulley as a private hospital. Walker was on the Mohave County Board of Supervisors. Surgeries took place in the small kitchen of the 2-bedroom tufa stone and adobe bungalow. It is said that medical procedures here were often learned as needed. One surgery for an "Ischio rectal abscess right side" was performed on September 10 by Dr. Tilton as the Physician and a Dr. White as the "Anisthest" [sic]. The patient had been admitted on the 6th and was discharged on the 27th after a similar abscess on the left side was also removed on September 20th. (Dr. Albert L. Tilton was one of the M.D.s who signed Minnie's Nursing Certificate. Was this the same Tilton as in Kingman?) (See also May 1986.)]

[1919 - The board of supervisors wanted to issue bonds for a hospital building, but the attorney general refused to sanction it without a vote of the people and the bond buyers would not take the bonds without approval of the attorney general. (Prior to this, "the people of the county voted favorably on the building of a hospital, but failed to make provision for the funds wherewith to erect the buildings. This action was carried to the people at two elections and the people voted almost unanimously for it. The legislature also agreed to an issue of $30,000 for the hospital, but like the other issues this did not provide the coin."

During the global Influenza Pandemic (which began the previous year), the two-year-old high school in Kingman was turned into a hospital for the seriously ill. Volunteers manned the facility until they, too, succumbed to the dread disease. According to residents, very few families were not touched by the epidemic which took a large death toll as well as temporarily incapacitating many.

Estimates put the worldwide death toll at between 20 and 40 million. Some one billion people were affected by the disease -- half of the total human population. From August 1918, when cases of the flu (and its companion pneumonia) started looking abnormally high, until the following July when they returned to about normal, 20 million Americans became sick and 675,000 died. In October, 1918, the flu reached its peak, killing about 195,000 Americans. About 57,000 American soldiers died from influenza while the U.S. was in the Great War (1915-1919); about 53,500 died in battle. Other major killers at the time were smallpox and typhoid fever.]

[1920 - Mohave County pop.: 5,259 ; Kingman pop.: 1,276 (voting precinct)

June 8: County voters went to the polls and approved by a 4 to 1 margin an $80,000 bond issue to build and equip a county hospital. (The county had an estimated taxable property base of $24 million.)

November: Between now and the following January, architects of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company would draw up the plans for the new hospital.]