Reid House, Vernon Parish Louisiana Submitted by Jane Parker McManus Date: February 5, 2009 ************************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************** The Reid House (information posted on the Web Site of the Dept. of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism for the state of Louisiana) The Reid House was built c. 1905 and completely remodeled in 1925, the latter being documented in a contract. Because the remodeling was so extensive, for Register purposes the house dates from 1925. The two story wood frame house with Craftsman exterior features is located on a hillock some three blocks west of downtown Leesville, the seat of Vernon Parish. The immediate neighborhood is mixed early twentieth century and modern. Happily, the house survives largely unchanged from the 1925 remodeling. The house occupied by Dr. William E. Reid, who established Leesville’s first hospital, is at the highest elevation in town. The land sweeps upward to the west from the old CBD, and then the house itself stands atop a corner parcel that is 10 to 12 feet above street level. A brick retaining wall with cast iron ornamentation found at the front is believed to date to the original c. 1905 construction. To the side is a concrete retaining wall. A 150 year old live oak graces the front yard. As noted above, the 1925 work was quite extensive. In fact, the only features that appear to remain from c. 1905 are the door and window frames on the interior (described below). The house is articulated as an oblong-shaped main block with a recessed side wing which extends to the rear to yield an overall “L” footprint. A one-story porch is located to the south side of the façade. The porch has a flat roof while the main roofs are gable end. The roof on the main block and side wing feature wide overhangs with large brackets in the Craftsman manner. At the north end of the façade is a small entrance porch inset at the corner. It features shallow arch openings. Above one opening is a hood resting on prominent brackets. The flat roof main front porch features screening ornamented with wooden members set in a decorative geometrical pattern. Like the brackets, this should be viewed within the overall Craftsman tradition. The house’s numerous windows are six over six. They appear singly or in groups of two or three. The staircase registers on the exterior in a tall shallow arch window on the side elevation. Above, at the attic level, is a smaller round arch window. The first floor plan features an entrance hall containing the staircase and providing access to the kitchen at the rear and a large living room which stretches across the remainder of the main block. Behind the living room is a dining room. The side wing contains three rooms. At the second story are various rooms arranged off a long hall. The interior is fairly simply finished. The enclosed staircase is functional rather than decorative; its landing is marked on the exterior with a large arched window, as noted previously. All of the openings on the first floor and in the hall at the second story feature bull’s eye corner blocks. Those in the second floor rooms feature a plain corner block formed of a piece of wood. Surely all the foregoing door and window frames date from c. 1905. The mantels (3) are from the 1925 remodeling. Although not identical (there are two models), all have a traditional design of pilasters and entablature. The Reid House has received relatively little in the way of alterations since 1925. They include crown molding throughout installed by the present owners, furring down the ceiling on the perimeter of the dining room to run ducts, the walling off many years ago (perhaps during the historic period) of the fireplace in the dining room, and modifications at the rear. When the present owners acquired the house, the rather functional looking back porch did not extend to meet the ell; this space was filled in. The simple porch posts were in deteriorated condition and were replicated, and modern flooring was used in the porch floor. Assessment of Integrity: Because alterations to the house have been very minimal, there is no question that Dr. William E. Reid, the founder of Leesville’s first hospital, would recognize it today. Contributing Element: Just behind the house is a garage which combines concrete block and wood frame construction. (The narrow garage weatherboarding found on the gable ends is identical to that of the house.) The architectural evidence and the oral tradition indicate that the garage dates from roughly the same time as the 1925 remodeling; hence the building is being listed as a contributing dependency. SIGNIFICANT DATES: 1928-1948 ARCHITECT/BUILDER: C. W. Gorin, Builder CRITERION: B The Dr. William E. Reid House is locally significant in the area of health/medicine because it was the home of the physician who established and operated Leesville’s – and by extension, Vernon Parish’s – first hospital. Dr. Reid lived in the house from 1928, the year he established the hospital, to 1948, when he moved to Shreveport. Leesville is the parish seat of Vernon Parish, a large rural area (the state’s third largest) with a population of only 20,493 in 1930. Leesville, the only town of any size, had a population of 3,291 in 1930. While the history of hospital development in Louisiana is yet to be written, it is known that generally only good-size cities had hospitals until beginning in roughly the 1920s; and with most towns in the state being small, this meant a lack of immediate, advanced health care for many Louisianians. Based upon the limited research conducted to date on the subject, it appears that hospitals began to be established in small towns in the 1920s and continued through the 1940s. For example, the Union Parish seat of Farmerville did not have a full-fledged hospital until 1948. Leesville, the parish seat of Vernon, was more fortunate. In 1928, Dr. William E. Reid, a native of adjacent Beauregard Parish, established the town’s first hospital, the Leesville Hospital. Prior to this, the nearest hospital would have been in Alexandria, or perhaps Natchitoches, both of which are an hour away by car today. Born in 1891, Reid was educated at Memphis Hospital Medical College, where he received a Certificate in Operative Surgery and Physical Diagnosis in 1912. Reid’s first hospital was replaced in 1935 with a new facility, which he continued to operate until 1948. (These building do not survive.) Regrettably, the opening of the Leesville Hospital cannot be documented in newspapers of the period because no issues of the local paper, the Leesville Leader, survive for the year 1928. Subsequent issues of the Leader (1929-31) make many references to the facility and the type of treatment being offered there. Additional information can be extrapolated from a successful National Register nomination done recently on Union Parish’s first hospital, established in 1948. Here the SHPO staff was able to interview the hospital’s founder. Finally, there is a 1949 source for Leesville which provides some statistics about the Leesville Hospital at that time. Before the opening of full-fledged hospitals in small towns, locally available health care was indeed limited. In short, while there were doctor’s offices in Leesville (including a doctor on retainer for the huge Nona Mills Lumber Company), there were no operating rooms, no hospital rooms for extended care, and no lab or X-ray facilities. A review of the Leesville Leader in the early years of Dr. Reid’s hospital provides considerable insight into the type of treatment available. Always on the front page, hospital news took the form of either individual items or an “In the Local Hospital” article listing patients and their illnesses and treatments. For example, on February 14, 1929, “In the Local Hospital” reported 12 patients being hospitalized for the following: a serious burn, appendectomies, an auto accident, a caesarian, “several serious operations,” and an undisclosed illness requiring several weeks of treatment. Business was apparently good because later issues in 1929 reported the arrival of a nurse from the Baptist hospital in Alexandria “to take care of the increasing number of patients” and mentioned another nurse from nearby DeRidder being there on “special duty.” On January 9, 1930, in a front-page article, the editor listed improvements to the hospital as one of eight items to brag about in “What the New Year Brings to Leesville.” Specifically, the hospital had received additional equipment worth $10,000.00,”making it the best equipped between Shreveport and Lake Charles.” (Shreveport is a large city about 2 hours to the north, and Lake Charles is about one-and-a-half hours to the south.) By 1949, the Leesville Hospital had a 25-bed capacity. However, it was no longer the parish’s only hospital. But is was still surpassed in size only by the War Memorial Hospital, a state-of-the-art, 36 bed facility built in 1945 by the U. S. government. (Camp Polk was established at Leesville in 1941 and massive Army training maneuvers were conducted in the region throughout the war.) Dr. Reid continued as owner and operator of the Leesville Hospital until 1948, when he moved to Shreveport (and considerably up the career ladder) to become superintendent of Charity Hospital. He and his family lived in the candidate for twenty years – from 1928, when his wife purchased the property, until December 1948, when it was sold to Sidney and Ann Campbell. As noted previously, the hospital he established in 1928 and its successor building (1935) are no longer extant. BIBLIIOGRAPHY Vernon Parish Conveyance Records Leesville Leader, various issues in 1929, 1930, 1931. Vernon Parish Planning Board, Vernon Parish Resources and Facilities, April 1949.