LAKEMORE
To Lakemore residents, Edwin Shaw Hospital was the heart of a village, an asset to be treasured, a source of neighborhood pride.
To patients and orphaned children and addicts, Edwin Shaw was a place of healing, a center for hope, a partner in the struggle of a lifetime.
To employees, Edwin Shaw was family, a collection of skilled and caring individuals who witnessed — if not created — a few miracles along the way.
Tuesday night, about 130 people with connection to the county-owned facility met to share stories and say goodbye to the 101-year-old 14-building campus, which is slated to be razed in December.
“Even though the buildings are coming down, brick and mortar is all they are,” said Rose Lee, who grew up playing on the property before taking a job there, as many of her family members did. “The true heart of Edwin Shaw are the patients and the employees” whose memories will live on.
The special reunion took place at the Lakemore United Methodist Church, where Summit County records manager Teresa Corall set up a display of photographs, artifacts and documents.
She talked about being tapped to help preserve records when the facility was closed in 2005, just prior to Akron General Medical Center using it as an in-patient rehab center for five years.
She rescued boxes of admittance cards, which have since been logged and indexed on the genealogy site FamilySearch.org. About a dozen scrapbooks, some dating to the hospital’s 1915 founding, have been digitized and will soon be made available online.
Corall then led the gathering on a short history of the property, from its opening as a tuberculosis hospital to its 1960s stint as an orphanage to its evolution into a rehab center and addiction treatment facility.
Many laughed as she tossed out details she learned while organizing records: How the diaper-type pants worn by child patients were called “G strings” on order forms, how the county ignored superintendent Edwin Shaw’s written objection to the hospital being named for him, how a 1937 union contract provided for women employees to get 35 cents an hour and their male counterparts 42 cents.
“Some things never change,” Corall chuckled.
After Corall was finished, former patients and employees took over the mic, sharing their own memories.
Karen Ferns, who worked as a nursing assistant for 11 years, recalled the story of how one of her young charges — long in a coma after being shot in the head — rose and walked after a woman came into his room and asked to pray over his body.
“Edwin Shaw to me was a miracle place,” she said.
Sterling Duncan shared his own personal story of salvation. He said he didn’t sober up immediately after a 15-day stay during a 1994 admission for alcoholism, but the things the staff taught him all came back when he was ready.
“I wasn’t a bad person, I was just sick,” said Duncan, who credits 16 years of sobriety to the care he was given.
Betty Ross, 82, a lifelong resident of Lakemore, shared the kinds of stories that many hospital neighbors had — tales that shifted between childhood memories of sneaking through the tunnels that connected the many buildings to accept cookies and milk from the kitchen staff to a list of family members whose livelihoods depended on the village’s biggest employer.
Officials said they couldn’t grant requests to walk through the actual property for safety reasons. Windows are broken or boarded up. Grass is overgrown. Trees have toppled over. Buildings have been tagged with graffiti. The interior is filled with fleas, mold, and county workers have even found blood trails, suggesting vandals or scavengers badly cut themselves.
Since being shuttered in 2010, the buildings have become the target of thieves and vandals, with arrests numbering 60 or more.
The county has no plans to disturb a cemetery on the land, the final resting place of 245 men, women and children who died at the tuberculosis hospital.
And there are also no plans to relocate the three-hole Challenge Golf Course, a facility open to the public but specifically designed for people with disabilities or in therapy.
But the county is hoping that once the buildings are down, it will succeed in doing what it has been trying for six years: to finally find a buyer, develop the 100-acre property, and hopefully return some jobs to the small village.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.