Baltimore City Hospitals photograph album

Baltimore City Hospitals

The City of Baltimore purchased 46 acres on the 4900 block of Eastern Avenue in Baltimore in 1862 as a site for a replacement for "Calverton", the almshouse which it had operated in common with Baltimore County since 1820 just east of Gwynn's Falls. The original "Bay View Asylum"- so called because it commanded a phenomenal sweep of Chesapeake Bay, especially from its central cupola which rose 184 feet above sea level- was a three-story brich structure designed in the shape of an inverted T by William Marshall, opened for the reception of the city's insane and paupers in 1866. In 1871, the institution began its slow evolution into a public hospital by accepting its first paying patients in addition to the people remanded to its care by the courts. In the latter part of the 1870s, the authorities erected a four-story brick structure just north of the 714-foot long Asylum building for the separate accomodation of the insane; in the course of the 1880s a smaller structure went up just west of this to enable the authorities to segregate their charges by sex, males occupying the smaller structure and females the larger one.

While additional wings were added to the Asylum Building and more and more outbuildings arose around the farm which covered most of the acreage, no more substantial changes occured until the administration of Mayor J. Barry Mahool, which governed from 1907 to 1911. Mahool made space in the perenially overcrowded Asylum Building by constructing a parallel institution-Sydenham Hospital- for African Americans at the southeastern corner of the Bay View property, where it operated from 1909 through 1923. He also began construction of a Y-shaped "general hospital", usually referred to as "Ward A" to the north and east of the Asylum Building. Beginning with Ward A's opening in 1911, the city at last had a separate municipally operated general hospital, as opposed to a mental hospital, a tuberculosis hospital, or a home for the indigent sick.

It was this general hospital aspect that grew, first with the 1932 Nurses' Home built to the south of Ward A, and then with the six-story City Hospital Building of 1938, which had the old Ward A as just one of its wings. The entire operation had been re-named "Baltimore City Hospital" in 1925 to de-emphasize it's "asylum" past; in 1935 its traditional supervisors, the Board of City Charities, was converted into the Department of Public Welfare to reflect an increased level of professionalism.

In the course of the 1940s the last vestiges of the institution's "asylum" past were phased out, and in the early 1950s the 1866 Asylum Building was gutted and completely rebuilt as a five-story, rather than a three-story, adjunct of the City Hospital. It also lost its trademark central tower at this point. Finally, in 1984 the city, alarmed at the expense of operating a municipal hospital, sold the land and buildings of the sprawling complex to Johns Hopkins Hospital- which promplty re-named it "Francis Scott Key Medical Center"- for $1. It was again renamed in 1994 to become the "Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center".

Nellie Frances Pearce was born on April 22, 1902 in Camden County, North Carolina. She was the eldest of six children born to Leah Chessie Simmons (1878-1968) and George Frank Pearce (1879-1970). Her younger siblings were William Charles (1903-1967), George Ira (1905-1996), Sarah Edna (1908-1992), Curtis Worth (1910-1924), and Andrew Wilson (1914-1981). Nellie grew up in North Carolina, but left around 1930 to work for Lever Brothers, a manufacturing company. In 1933 she moved to Baltimore, Maryland to train as a nurse at Baltimore City Hospitals.

In September of that year, she was accepted into a training program to become a Licensed Practical Nurse. She completed the course and was awarded a certificate of completion on September 7, 1934. Five months later in February 1935, Nellie went before the Maryland State Board of Examiners of Nurses, and received her Licensed Practical Nurse Certificate. Nurse Pearce lived in the Nurse's Home on the BCH campus and worked there until June 1958, when she left to get married. However, she remained involved with Baltimore City Hospitals as a member of the BCH Alumnae Association and the Maryland Licensed Practical Nurses Association, both organizations of which she helped to organize.

Her husband was Edward Abbott Daniel (1897-1975), a resident of Hopewell, Virginia. The couple married on July 5, 1958 in Gates County, North Carolina. They made their home in Hopewell, and Nellie continued to live there after her husband's death in 1975. She died on July 17, 1998 at the age of 96 and was buried at Westlawn Cemetery in Elizabeth City, Pasquotank County, North Carolina.