Demolition brings to mind memories of City Hospital

Goodbye, City Hospital. You who so recently housed the old and in the way are now old and in the way. Another large piece of Fayetteville history has been added to the crucible of time.

I was not even old enough to buy beer when I passed through those stately columns that faced South School Street to begin one of my first jobs in this area.

I was trained by an Army nurse who meant business and took great pride in making a flat sheet fit better than a fitted one and expected the same of any one under her supervision. I became an “orderly” in 1974 and began my long medical career.

Nurses wore starched caps and longer white dresses and most were strictly professional. We all stood up when a doctor walked onto our floor and remained standing until he was gone. Almost entirely male doctors. I do remember one female doctor who was given the same respect.

I worked the night shift and often my coworkers and I would take our breaks in the back of the hospital next to the bizarre curving metal tunnel that served as a fire escape, reaching all the way up to the third floor. I would sit in the dark and listen to the eerie cries of nighthawks that always seem to appear and circle above the hospital when someone died. Escorting their souls into the void, perhaps?

At City Hospital, I would care for so many old-time hill folk who were a wealth of knowledge of country living and making do. Many grew up in the wilds of Madison County during the Depression and could remember cutting ties for the railroad and the trains that would stop at Crosses, Durham, Elkins and Fayette Junction. Most all wanted to go home even if home was no more.

Later I would work as a physical therapist assistant, a maintenance guy and finally a social worker. I would make irreplaceable friendships there.

City Hospital and the history of Fayetteville are forever intertwined. But now she is old and in the way.

The other day, I stopped at the demolition site to ask for some bricks as souvenirs. The young man on the bulldozer quickly jumped down, embarrassed I am sure by tears in a grown man’s eyes, and began to hand me old red bricks, more than I could carry. I started to tell him about how long I had worked there and what it meant to me, but I halted because he had a job to do — the job of erasing any evidence of a proud old institution given to the city by a charitable family for the care of its citizens.

I quietly took my heavy load of bricks and placed them in my car. My empty hands stained red. A hot summer wind blew the brick dust around the parking lot. That old funeral refrain came to mind: dust to dust.

MIKE OGLESBY

Elkins