Bradshaw
Ardoin’s Sanitarium in Ville Platte had been “one of the most amazing hospitals of its kind” before it was leveled by fire on March 2, 1937. The fire was discovered about 2:30 a.m. and “within an hour after the alarm was sounded, Ardoin’s Sanitarium, with its seventyfive patient capacity … was no more.”
Sixteen or seventeen patients were in the hospital when the fire began. “All of them were saved, either by firemen or nurses, without any mishap,” except for one man who received minor burns when “after being warned to hurry out, waited to put on his clothes.”
Dr. J. Yves Ardoin, who opened the hospital in an old home in 1926, immediately promised that “the great sanitarium bearing his name would be speedily rebuilt in brick,” according to the Ville Platte Gazette. The newspaper said Ardoin’s Sanitarium had grown from “a small four-room affair to perhaps the most complete hospital in this section of Louisiana.”
Bradshaw
In the newspaper’s opinion, the March 2 fire was “the greatest single loss this city has ever experienced. Besides the building, it consumed “the most modern surgical equipment, X-rays, magnificent office suites, fluoroscope, valuable medical books, hospital equipment and other paraphernalia which went to make up the famous hospital.” “Famous” seems not to have been an exaggeration. People came to Ville Platte from other states because of the hospital’s reputation.
Dr. Ardoin was true to his word about rebuilding quickly. When the G. J. Deville Lumber Company was awarded the contract for a new hospital just three months after the fire, the Gazette said “the new hospital, built entirely of glazed brick, will be one of the finest in Louisiana.” The building alone would cost “upwards of $40,000,” and that did not include “the elaborate and expensive equipment with which Ardoin’s sanitarium will be equipped.” When work started in the middle of June, it was said to be the largest single piece of work ever undertaken by a Ville Platte building firm. The new building was shaped like an E; an east wing housed operating rooms, the center wing included 38 patient rooms, medical offices were in the west wing.
During the reconstruction Dr. Ardoin, his sons-in-law Dr. C. L. Attaway and Dr. R. E. Dupre, and dentist J. H. Wiggins, whose office was in the destroyed hospital, worked from temporary offices in a building on the hospital grounds that had not been damaged.
The new hospital was completed within a year, taking up an entire block of West Main Street between S. Dupre and S. Thompson Sßtreets. Judge Gilbert Dupre, a Ville Platte native who returned for a visit after a long absence, was one of its early admirers. He said in a letter to the Gazette, “I do not believe there is any private institution to equal it in South West Louisiana, or even in the Northern portions of the State, I was struck with admiration. Your people should be proud of it and give it your unstinted support. … The town that I knew as a sleepy hollow 50 years ago [c. 1890], is a bustling one now. It has a heathy vigor, abounding with new life, and its crowning glory is the hospital.”
Dr. Ardoin died in January 1944, but the hospital continued to grow. More rooms were added that year, more of them in 1949, and still more in 1953. At one point it was said to be the largest employer in Evangeline Parish, providing more than 300 jobs.
The hospital was replaced in 1974, when Humana opened Ville Platte General Hospital, but continued in use as a clinic for years after that. There were outpourings of nostalgia in the newspaper when it was finally torn down in the summer of 2001.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
