St. John’s Sanitarium

A photo layout for the 25th anniversary of St. John’s Sanitarium, 1944 (Courtesy State Journal-Register)

St. John’s Sanitarium near Riverton was a refuge for tuberculosis patients and disabled children for more than 50 years. The project was the idea of a Catholic priest, the Rev. Joseph Straub, and the final product was almost as elaborate as Straub first imagined.

Tuberculosis was among the most common causes of death in Sangamon County in the early 20th century. The usual course of treatment involved fresh air, isolation, and good nutrition and sanitation, all of which were most easily attained in sanitariums located away from crowded, polluted urban areas.

The disease was so  widespread in central Illinois that by 1920 Springfield had two TB sanitariums. The first, the Open Air Colony, was founded by Dr. George T. Palmer, an anti-TB crusader,  in 1913.

Ground was broken for the larger St. John’s Sanitarium in 1918. Straub picked the 534-acre site because it was adjacent to both the Wabash Railroad and the Interurban electric railway, had access to ample Sangamon River water, and boasted “attractive, scenic surroundings.”

The facility, owned by the Franciscan nuns who operated St. John’s Hospital, opened in July 1919. It was already overcrowded in July 1921, when the Illinois State Register published a full-page look at the still-incomplete complex. The TB hospital housed 160 patients at the time, while 35 disabled children, many of them polio victims, were in temporary quarters in the sanitarium’s service building.

In an over-the-top essay, Register writer Walter Lewis Patteson called the project Straub’s “dream city.”

The buildings now complete are the hospital for the tuberculosis patients and the service building … (T)he contemplated buildings which will curve northward from the chapel are those for the use of crippled children, who are now housed in the service building; the hospital for the treatment of nervous diseases; and a building for feeble-minded girls. At the respective ends of the semi-circle buildings will extend, at right angles, one containing private rooms for consumptives and the other quarters for convalescents from the city hospital.

The complex, which also included the spectacular St. Francis of Assisi Church, was designed by Springfield’s Helmle and Helmle architectural firm. The three-story sanitarium, the largest in downstate Illinois, had rooms for about 200 patients, plus therapy areas and a surgical suite.

Originally, patients paid $3 a week to stay at “the San,” a fee that included treatment by physicians. The weekly fee had been raised to $8 by 1922, when Sangamon County voters approved a tuberculosis tax, most of which was spent to pay the costs of treating county residents at the sanitarium.

Schoolroom at St.. John’s School and Hospital for Crippled Children, 1944 (SJ-R)

Because of the emphasis on ventilation, TB patients on bed rest could recline in sheltered open-air porches. The hospital also had recreation areas “for those patients who are well enough to enjoy them.” Disabled children attended school at the sanitarium, and some even graduated from high school there.

The complex was made as self-sustaining as possible. Sixty cows provided beef and milk, and the sanitarium’s 60 hogs were fed on slops from the kitchens, “all of it being heated and sterilized first.” Modern coops held 1,500 chickens, and domestic ducks and geese were housed near a stream that ran through the property. All the meat was processed in the sanitarium’s private slaughterhouse. Even the woodwork in the barns was of lumber sawn from trees on the site.

“None of the produce of the farm or garden are sold, all being used or exchanged,” Patteson wrote.

“(T)he dream is coming true,” Patteson’s story concluded. “… (W)hen the work of the architect and landscape engineer shall have transformed the rude bare field into a city beautiful, then will the place become what its builders designed – a place where the weary may find rest, the suffering surcease and the victims of disease the balm of healing in the pure breath of the prairie.”

TB victims often spent months or even years at the sanitarium, and many died there. If a resident died during the winter and was to be buried there, the basement served as a morgue until the ground was soft enough that a grave could be dug.

The complex ultimately  dropped its farming operations, turning to St. James Trade School next door for meat, milk and vegetables. Members of a male religious order, the Franciscan Brothers of the Holy Cross, conducted the trade school.

But the sanitarium added other amenities.

“At one point,” State Journal-Register reporter Laura Ingals wrote when the TB sanitarium was demolished in 1994, “patients could learn homemaking and secretarial skills or play golf on a nine-hole miniature course.”

The sanitarium also had a patient-run newspaper, a pharmacy and library. The Hospital Sisters of St. Francis added their convent and motherhouse to the grounds in 1930.

In the 1960s, the sanitarium had a staff of 134 and a patient load that averaged 120-125 people at any one time.

Patients came from all over Illinois, Register reporter Robert Gonko wrote in 1962, “because their counties, in most cases, do not have a sanitorium or the facilities the San has. During the five-year period just ended, the San treated 875 patients from 55 of the state’s 102 counties.”

Eventually, however, medical developments eliminated the need for hospitals devoted solely to TB sufferers. St. John’s Crippled Children’s Hospital and School closed in 1958, and the TB facility shut down and was converted to the Franciscan Apostolic Center, a retreat and study center, in 1974. That building closed for good in 1992; it was razed two years later.

Approach to the former sanitarium, 2024 (SCHS)

With the number of Franciscan nuns dwindling, the Catholic Diocese of Springfield took over the entire complex in 2022. As of 2024, signs on the property pointed visitors to the Corpus Christi Priory and the Evermode Institute, as well as a part of the complex that was  still used by the remaining Franciscan nuns. Both the priory and the institute were projects of the Norbertines, a 1,000-year-old order of traditionalist Catholic clergy.

The Rev. Joseph Straub

Rev. Joseph Straub in 1905, the year he became director of the Franciscan nuns at St. John’s Hospital (findagrave.com)

Rev. Joseph Straub (1873-1936) was born in Germany and came with his parents to the Rochester, N.Y., area at age eight. He was ordained in Rochester in 1893 and a year later was appointed assistant pastor at Springfield’s Ss. Peter and Paul Parish, which then served a largely German-speaking congregation.

In 1905, Straub was named director of the order of Franciscan nuns that staffed St. John’s Hospital. Apparently a dynamic leader, he was “the guiding power behind expansion work that has more than doubled the size of the original hospital and made the institution into one of the largest of its kind in the state,” the Register said in Straub’s obituary.

He is buried at Crucifixion Hill Cemetery on the grounds of the former St. John’s Sanitarium.

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