Local History: South Orange's Hospital

By 1894, when The New York Times notes his return from Europe, Dr. Mefford Runyon was established in South Orange. A graduate of Columbia University, Runyon was soon to become attending surgeon of Orange Memorial Hospital, a consulting physician at the new Orange Orthopedic, and Surgeon-in-Chief (and owner) of a private hospital located at 516 Prospect St. (Then South Orange, now Maplewood, this building is now the Ethical Culture Society.) His home was 18 Academy St., now a parking lot, and his office was located at 110 Irvington Ave., approximately where the vacant bank building is today.

Dr. Runyon married Mary Hunting in October 1889, a year after his hospital was built. Their son, Paul Mefford Runyon was born in November 1891. By that time, Runyon was clearly a person to know in South Orange. A 1904 map that shows only a handful of important places in town lists both his office and hospital. He would probably have known the Kip family, and certainly Ira Kip by that point. The doctor served as president of the South Orange Board of Health, apparently overlapping with Kip’s time as Village President. Both men belonged to the South Orange Field Club, and both golfed and sailed yachts. According to the 1908 Social Blue Book of the Oranges, they held memberships in the New England Society of the Oranges.  

Still, Runyon and wife Mary Hunting Runyon weren’t quite as socially prominent as the Kips, who appeared in the New York Social Register regularly. Runyon practiced medicine at his office and hospital; perhaps he treated the Kip family at some point. (I have heard Dr. Runyon’s hospital described as a convalescent home to tuberculosis patients. However, the only medical record I have found is of an encephalitis patient. Patients seemed to live there; The New York Times reports a wedding held there in 1910.) 

The onset of World War I, however, altered the social fabric. Katherine Kip donated the use of her island to the Canadian government for use as a convalescent hospital. In return, the Canadian government lent the Kips a houseboat, “Halcyon.”  The hospital was known by several names; one was the Kip hospital and another was Thwartways.

The details are lost to history, but records of the Arthur Child Heritage Museum and Gananoque Museum Collections suggest that Katherine hired hospital staff. She chose South Orange’s Dr. Runyon, whose wife died in 1916, to join her in the Thousand Islands for the summer of 1917, according to The New York Times. That summer she gave the houseboat to the hospital for use, as well, and it seems that her daughter, Katherine, served as a nurse on the island. Photos and records of the hospital show that Canadian soldiers found respite there; letters of thanks to Katherine and a display of their regimental pins remain.

Researcher Tim Compeau writes of "a thousand" such soldiers who came to the area to be healed. For them, for the soldiers on the battlefields of Europe, and for the Kip family, the summer of 1917 brought irrevocable change.