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The weather was unfavorable, and few attended the dedication of the Sanitarium’s newest building. But as the noon commencement approached, the clouds parted and, as Scruggs reported, “gave us one of the loveliest of North Carolina’s winter days.”
Dr. (and Reverend) Lawson Scruggs opened the ceremony with a prayer and scripture reading, followed by a brief history of the institution. Mr. S. H. Tingley—husband of Adelia M. Hubbard Tingley, the building’s financial supporters—presented the keys. The Tingleys visited the area the previous year from their home in Rhode Island. There, an acquaintance had told them of the Pickford Sanitarium. After visiting, Scruggs told the audience, they “were impressed with the great need of our race for such a place, and touched by our efforts to meet this need with limited facilities and still more limited means.” The Hubbard Cottage was the result.
The newly constructed structure stretched sixty-four feet, with turrets on each side. The Southern Sanitarium described the interior:
“Entering the front door one is ushered into a pleasant reception room. The end opposite the door is entirely of glass, through which an abundance of sunshine streams during a greater part of the day. This room has a prettily decorated fireplace, and is furnished with chiffonier, bookcase, center table, and comfortable rocking chairs, while picture cards, calendars, and a few simple ornaments add brightness to the room. … To the right and left of this room extend the two wards, each heated by an open fire and lighted by six large windows. … The white iron bedsteads, six in each ward, are supplied with good springs, soft mattresses, spotless pillows, sheets, and spreads, and each bed has two pairs of warm red blankets.”
Julian Carr had hoped to attend, though he must have had something more pressing to do, as his name did not appear among those present.
The Honorable Dr. Richard H. Battle began his nostalgic address before an audience in wet and windy Southern Pines. He “pictured the Southern lady of antebellum days, starting out in the morning with her well-laden basket of medicines and delicacies to visit the sick on her plantation.” The sanitarium that Scruggs founded, he said, would now take the place of that mistress of old. Battle delivered the leading address for the cottage dedication. The ceremony included vocal and instrumental music, closing with the hymn “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”
The success of the Pickford Sanitarium had exceeded even Scruggs’s expectations. By the end of its third year, it had treated thirty-four patients, thirty-three of whom recovered. The work, he wrote, was done “under the severest and most trying circumstances, because of a want of both moral and financial support from the leaders of our own Race.”
In the months that followed, Scruggs continued his medical practice and his public health education, often speaking to the community on topics such as “Good Health and How to Preserve It.”
All was not well, however, for Dr. Scruggs and his race.
The wholesale disenfranchisement of Dr. Lawson Scruggs after the massacre and coup—and of tens of thousands of Black men and women in North Carolina, and indeed millions across the South and the nation—did not happen all at once. But it happened nonetheless, and it was dramatic. The state’s first Jim Crow law passed in 1899, requiring segregated train compartments. Within a few years, as historian David Zucchino observed,
“new legislation would mandate separate Black and white facilities from the cradle to the grave—from hospitals to schools to cemeteries. Jim Crow laws soon required segregated toilets, water fountains, cinemas, swimming pools, and public parks.”
In 1900, the suffrage amendment that Josephus Daniels worked so hard and traveled so far to advance passed into law.
For Scruggs, the loss of status and influence came swiftly and severely. The available evidence suggests that he would never again teach at a university, never again write for a newspaper, never again publicly share his political or scientific views, never again found a new hospital or organization. His few public statements after the coup and his dismissal from the hospital were measured, reserved, cautious, as though the wind had been taken from his sails.
A man of such vision, determination, brilliance, and moral purpose had been silenced. A physician who had helped bring about a remarkable improvement in health and survival among his people was largely ignored.
Still, Dr. Scruggs kept doing what he could. Year after year, he continued caring for his patients at the Pickford Sanitarium.
Mattie Maggett suffered from the lingering effects of typhoid fever for more than two years before seeking help at the Pickford Sanitarium in the spring of 1901. The disease left her short of breath, her lungs weak. She had tried several remedies, including widely advertised patent medicines, but none had helped. Despite her doubts, she decided to go to Southern Pines for treatment. She arrived thin and frail, weighing just one hundred pounds, and was soon under the care of Dr. Scruggs and his team. Within a week, she noticed improvement. Within a month, she had gained eight pounds, and her appetite had returned.
Others, too, found relief under Dr. Scruggs’s care. Mr. John O. Young entered the Sanitarium in November 1900 feeling weak, with chills, fever, and a persistent cough. He stayed until April 1901. When he left, his appetite was strong, his cough had improved, and he had gained six and a half pounds.
Mrs. E. M. W. of Raleigh gained eight pounds during her four-month stay, along with renewed strength and appetite. “So I can say truthfully I have been benefited in all respects,” she wrote, “and advise all persons that are suffering from troubles of the throat or lungs to go to Pickford Sanitarium, where they can be benefited.”
Another patient, a mother named Josephine Soon of Southern Pines, brought her infant to the Sanitarium laid on a pillow—too weak to hold up his head. The baby, weighing only nine pounds, showed no signs of improvement with any treatment. “We finally gave the case up to the Sanitarium and the Lord,” she said. After ten weeks, the child weighed twenty-two pounds “and is still gaining every day.”
Scruggs reported seventy-five visitors and potential benefactors during the winter of 1900–1901, most from the Northeast.
But there were signs of change among his mentors. Dr. Lewis seemed indifferent to Scruggs’s work—the successes of the Sanitarium, the neighborhood efforts around St. Agnes Hospital. By the turn of the century, Lewis was no longer on the Board of the Pickford Sanitarium, though he continued serving on the Board of Trustees and teaching at St. Augustine’s after Scruggs’s departure.
While a few lives were saved and improved in Southern Pines, the suffering and death among Black residents in Raleigh climbed again. By the summer of 1900, a year or two after Lawson Scruggs, Marie Burgess, and the other Black faculty at St. Agnes Hospital had been dismissed, deaths among Black residents rose sharply, returning to the levels seen before Burgess and her nursing students began their neighborhood work under Scruggs’s direction.
There was hardly any public mention of the earlier drop in mortality from 1897 to 1899. Though the data could be seen in the Bulletin, neither Dr. Lewis nor anyone else on the State Board of Health found it worth discussion. No references appeared in the North Carolina Medical Society’s annual meetings or in its Transactions. Newspapers ignored it as well. The only recognition of the remarkable decline in deaths, one Dr. McKee himself had attributed to Scruggs, appeared in a book highlighting the accomplishments of Black Americans, with limited readership.
The decline had run its course. Deaths among Black residents in Raleigh skyrocketed in 1901 to levels unseen since Scruggs’s graduation from medical school—and they would remain that high for years to come.
Josephus Daniels’s campaign to disenfranchise Black citizens, including Dr. Lawson Scruggs, achieved its intended effect. Year after year, Dr. Scruggs submitted annual reports for the Sanitarium to the North Carolina Board of Charities. In 1902, he wrote simply, “Officers, myself and wife, get no salary as yet.” He added, “We get no aid from city, county, or state.”
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1900 Mar, Apr 28 Southern Sanitarium
https://www.newspapers.com/image/58053697/?terms=scruggs&match=1
ttps://www.newspapers.com/image/58053563/?terms=%22pickford%20sanitarium%22&match=1
Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie. p. 311-312.
https://archive.org/details/annualcatalogueo18991914/page/404/mode/2up?q=lewis
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