Hospital pays tribute to Sisters of Mercy in Joplin
Oct. 22—Dozens of Mercy Hospital Joplin officials gathered Thursday morning at the northeast corner of the Gryphon Building's parking lot to pay tribute to an event that took place more than 136 years ago.
On a blistering July day in 1885, a dozen Sisters of Mercy — decked out in black-and-white habits — arrived at the train depot in downtown Joplin. Before the year's end, they would establish what is today the Joplin Area Catholic Schools. A decade after that, on Oct. 24, 1896, those same nuns would open a nearby tent hospital. That 10-bed facility would grow, over the next 125 years, into Mercy Hospital Joplin.
"They are the reason we are here," said Jeremy Drinkwitz, Mercy Hospital Joplin's president, as he honored the sisters and their contribution to the region.
When the original Sisters of Mercy arrived in Joplin after a 540-mile train ride from Kentucky, their strength of faith would immediately be tested, Drinkwitz said. The nuns were accustomed to Southern hospitality when arriving at new locations. In Joplin, they anticipated being treated with dignity and respect. They received nothing of the kind. Joplin was a rough-and-tumble mining town, filled with hard men living hard lives.
What the nuns experienced from jeering Joplin residents, many openly cursing or doing far worse, "scared (the sisters) half to death. ... They almost decided to leave town three days later because none of them had experienced anything like that," Drinkwitz said. "Now think about that — if they had left, we probably wouldn't be standing here at this moment in time."
But they didn't leave Joplin; the nuns stayed and served.
"Some of the sisters when they got off that train were scared, there's no getting around that," Sister of Mercy Cabrini Koelsch said. "But they had a faith in God to know that they could do it. They said, 'We're going to take care of these people; we see the needs, and we're going to try to meet those needs.'"
According to Julie Mercer, Mercy's vice president of mission services, while the nuns stayed indoors near St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church on Pearl Avenue, drunken miners leaving the saloons that dotted Joplin's downtown district would stop to taunt the sisters from the streets.
"I thought the sisters showed such bravery," Mercer said. "They kept going and serving because they knew this community needed them."
As time went by, the sisters noticed a lack of professional health care services in town. In the 1890s, Joplin had no local hospital. The men who were seriously injured inside the lead and zinc mines were placed in wagons or on trains and taken to Fort Scott, Kansas, which operated the nearest hospital.
Those injured men, Sister of Mercy Joan Margret Schwager said, "often wouldn't make it" to Fort Scott, a five-hour train ride away. The sisters realized "they needed to start a hospital right here. They were very fortunate that someone provided the land and the tent to start out. From there, we have what we have today."
"And that's how this whole thing started," Drinkwitz said.
During Thursday's ceremony, hospital officials and employees both took time to remember and praise the Sisters of Mercy who served and continue to serve the Joplin area, offering prayer and even rededicating themselves to the legacy of selfless service to the area's poor and sick.
That legacy, said Kevin Manning, Mercy's chief nursing officer, "drives us today to bring the very best to those entrusted in our care."
When asked about the hospital's 125 years of service, Mercer said the number never ceases to amaze her.
"It really tells us the dedication, the resiliency, the courage and the risk-taking that those sisters undertook all those years ago," she said. Today, "we take that behavior and interpret it toward the way we serve" to heal the sick. "We're called to do this by God and so we're going to stay faithful to the struggle ... for another 125 years."
