“Everyone was poor”

On April 8^th 1902, a crowd of 10,000 gathered in the city of Lewiston to celebrate the official blessing of the Grey Nuns’ latest hospital facility by the Most Reverend Bishop William O’Connell. Not until 1908 would the foundation’s formal name, the Hospital General Sainte-Marie, a name that blended both its English and French heritage, become widely used. The Lewiston community of Grey Nuns had founded a three-story brick hospital built of 980,000 bricks and 640 yards of stone work. It contained 150 beds divided into twelve wards, with an additional twenty-five bassinets in a new maternity ward. Sainte-Marie had fixtures for both gas and electricity with steel ceiling and even an elevator well constructed by the Penn Metal Ceiling and Roofing Co., from Philadelphia. There were two Gurney heaters each with a 9,000-foot capacity set by Henri Lagassey. The heating system required one ton of coal per day. The responsibility for obtaining such quantities of coal in an unstable market received the comment “Poor Sisters!” in the hospital’s annual report. Once again the assumption was made that the Grey Nuns would simply find a way to acquire affordable coal. The official cost for the hospital was reported to have been $100,000, collected penny by penny as the Grey Nuns’ begged, toiled, nursed, taught and cared. This sum, however excluded the twenty-three years of unpaid labor, sacrifice and prayers by the community. ¹