RALEIGH, N.C.
Dr. Charles Cook can remember the first time he laid eyes on the stone remains of St. Agnes Hospital. It was November 1980, and Cook was new to North Carolina. He had learned from a friend about St. Agnes, the once highly regarded Black hospital and nursing school founded in 1896. Most of the building, Cook’s friend told him, was still standing at the edge of the St. Augustine’s College campus.
“When I saw it I said, ‘Gosh, this is in real disrepair.’ There were no windows, no doors,” he said. I thought, ‘It’s a shame this can’t be used for something.’ Of course, ‘something,’ was as far as my imagination went at that time.”
Almost a decade later, Irene Clark, a professor of genetics, anatomy and science education at St. Augustine, was sitting on the steps outside a classroom when a janitor asked her what she knew about St. Agnes.
Did she know that the shell of a building was the place where world champion boxer Jack Johnson was pronounced dead? And the place where many Black Raleigh women had proudly come to give birth? Did she know that the college’s early students had not only quarried its stones, but built the facility by hand? “I honestly had no idea,” said Clark, who has since become the college’s curator of hospital history and artifacts. “But he had said just enough to really pique my interest.”
Now Cook, Clark and a committee of alumni, former student nurses, businesspeople and college staff have been asked to raise the funds not to only restore the humbled stone structure but to reconnect its present-day purpose with its auspicious and influential past.
St. Agnes has a long history of both upsetting and supporting the social order, nearly folding under fiscal constraints. St. Agnes also has a history of stop-and-start renovation and fund-raising activity, lawsuits and liens.
