Memories, goals abound for old Conroe hospital
Montgomery County facility was built in 1938 and closed in 1982; developer now envisions turning it into 42 to 45 senior units
CONROE — A young medical student once asked Dr. Walter “Wally” Wilkerson if he’d ever experienced a miracle?
He thought for a minute and then said, “Why yes” and told the young student about the time he felt like he experienced a miracle at the Montgomery County Hospital on First Street in Conroe.
A young healthy man, an oil field worker, had come in on a Saturday afternoon with abdominal pain. The nurse said she thought the man had appendicitis. Wilkerson examined him and agreed.
At the time, operations required two doctors. Dr. Deane Sadler was called in. He agreed with Dr. Wilkerson’s assessment.
They took the man’s appendix out. As they were closing the incision, the nurse said, “I can’t get a pulse.”
At the time, there was no such thing as a defibrillator.
“I had heard about this doctor up East who had been using cardiac massage,” Wilkerson said. “I had been reading about it. There wasn’t a lot of time, so we opened his chest and began squeezing his heart. We both stood there, probably as white as a sheet. Suddenly the nurse said, I can get a pulse now.”
Wilkerson said it telling the patient’s wife he didn’t know is her husband would live was one of the most difficult things he had to do.
The man got up and walked out of the hospital seven days later.
“That’s the miracle,” Wilkerson said.
That’s just one of the many, many memories Wilkerson has of Montgomery County Hospital where he spent countless hours as a young doctor in Conroe.
He’s now hopeful that the Overland Property Group is able to successfully renovate the propery into senior living apartments.
The Montgomery County Hospital was built in 1938.
“There were maybe a dozen doctors in the area. They wanted a state-of-the-art facility and the county was able to build it for them,” Foerster said.
Dr. Wilkerson came to Conroe in 1958 and joined Dr. Sadler’s practice.
He said the building was well constructed, but the service was still quite limited at the time. There was no emergency room or X-ray machine. When someone came into the hospital, they’d ring a bell to alert the nurse, the nurse would come and see what the problem was and then she’d contact one of the on-call doctors, Wilkerson said.
But one thing that was always on top of things was the lab at the hospital. He said it was run by a husband and wife, Sam and Hetti Alford.
The facility served the county through the 1970s when the Montgomery County Hospital District was formed for the creation of a new hospital for Conroe. A new Conroe medical complex opened in 1982 and the old county hospital was abandoned.
The East Texas Dream Center, a nonprofit, faith-based charitable organization, eventually found a new home at the property. Shawn and Shannon Nelson with the Dream Center purchased the 57,000-square-foot building in 2013 for $10,000.
A May 2018 fire revealed numerous code violations and the city closed the building. It has been uninhabited ever since.
On Jan. 27, Brett Johnson with Overland Property Group based near Kansas City presented to the Conroe City Council plans to redevelop the property.
Johnson’s group has renovated 65 historic properties, 19 of them in Texas, since the company started in 2002. The plan for the old hospital is to convert it into 42 to 45 senior living apartments.
Johnson said his company has a purchasing option on the facility through January 2022.
Some lobby renovations have been done, but the guts of the building are still a hospital, he said, noting there’s still hospital equipment there.
Foerster said the renovation of the old hospital could be a positive change for the community around it.
“The charm of the old building, along with the history of the old building and the people who worked there, who were born there, who recovered there and who passed away there are all a part of the mystique of the community itself,” Foerster said. “The building could also be a key to revitalizing the area around the hospital.“