Cover pages from the 1914 Plymouth Hospital and Nurses’ Training School report. “Founded 1906 by Dr. C. N. Garland, 12 East Springfield Street, Boston, Mass.”
Cover pages from the 1914 Plymouth Hospital and Nurses’ Training School report. “Founded 1906 by Dr. C. N. Garland, 12 East Springfield Street, Boston, Mass.”
“The year that I went in there, they had told him that he had to get it enlarged and get more equipment and pick up the standards more — because we wouldn’t be able to take the State Board.”
Lucille Allen
Nurse trained at Plymouth Hospital · Oral history, 1976
In 1903, Dr. Cornelius N. Garland arrived in Boston. He had graduated from Shaw University’s medical program in 1901, studied medicine at the University of London, and passed the Massachusetts medical exam with high honors.
None of it mattered. Black physicians were, in Garland’s own words, “scarcely admitted generally in the hospitals of the state.” Black doctors were shut out of hospital staffs. Black women were denied admission to nursing programs. The pattern was near-total exclusion.
Dr. Cornelius N. Garland, founder of Plymouth Hospital, from the 1914 hospital report
With donations from local Black churches, Garland purchased a brownstone at 12 East Springfield Street in Boston’s South End, and in 1908 he opened Plymouth Hospital and Nurses’ Training School, the first and only Black hospital in the city.
Black churches across the South End each adopted a ward, furnished it, and held fundraisers to sustain it. Columbus Avenue AME Zion Church. Charles Street AME Church. Black physicians like Dr. Columbus William Harrison, who served beside Garland for a decade, came to practice the medicine they were barred from practicing anywhere else.
This was the community’s answer to a system that excluded them.
This 1890 Bromley atlas of Boston shows the South End neighborhood where Garland would establish his hospital eighteen years later.
East Springfield Street runs through the center of the map. Directly to the south sits Boston City Hospital, the institution that refused Black doctors and nurses, and the very reason Plymouth Hospital had to exist.
The atlas records every lot, every owner. The community Garland served is drawn here in precise detail, the same blocks where Black churches would fundraise ward by ward to keep the hospital alive.
Bromley, G.W. & Co. Atlas of the City of Boston, Plate 18 (1890).
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library. No known copyright restrictions.
East Springfield Street (top) and Boston City Hospital (bottom), 1890. The hospital that excluded Black physicians stands just blocks from where Garland built his own.
Full atlas plate: Part of Wards 17, 18 & 20, City of Boston. Scale 100 ft. to the inch. Every pink lot is a residential building, the dense South End neighborhood that would sustain Plymouth Hospital through grassroots donations.
Dr. Garland’s office at Plymouth Hospital, with fireplace and medical library
A patient ward inside Plymouth Hospital, furnished by community donations
Class of Graduates, Plymouth Hospital and Nurses’ Training School. From the 1914 hospital report. These women trained at Plymouth because Boston’s hospital nursing programs refused to admit them.
Plymouth Hospital closed in 1928 after a bitter debate over whether to pursue integration or maintain separate institutions. The building became apartments. The story was nearly lost.
But the struggle for dignity that Garland confronted did not end. It continued through decades of exclusion from medical schools, from hospital staffs, from the institutions meant to serve everyone.
The neighborhoods Garland served still carry the highest burden of health inequity in the city. The work continues, and Plymouth’s story holds lessons about health justice that we are still learning.
Plymouth Hospital, c. 1910
12 East Springfield Street, today
“Garland wanted a place where colored people could go and freely train. We needed that hospital — if we had put our forces behind it, white and black would have gone there.”
Melnea Cass
Civil rights leader · Melnea Cass Boulevard in Boston is named in her honor
We are working to purchase and restore 12 East Springfield Street as a place where the community that built this institution is honored, and where the work of health justice continues.
2028 will mark the 100th anniversary of the hospital’s closing. We intend to mark it not with mourning but with restoration, returning the building to its purpose as a center of Black health, healing, and self-determination.
Black Heritage Site plaque at 12 East Springfield Street. The building is marked as historically significant — but no further preservation has been undertaken.
This would be the first.
To learn more, support this project, or join the founding committee, contact Vital Village Networks.
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