The History of the Asheville Veteran’s Administration Medical Center is a complex and fascinating one spanning over a century of care. Our research continues to uncover connections and put the people of this historic hospital site into better view. The latest of these discoveries involves a photo, simply captioned: “Unidentified woman, half-length portrait, wearing nurses uniform.”
This photo is part of a scrapbook donated to the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collection decades ago. The Mrs. Walter L. Massie Collection of Jesse Morris Photographs is the best resource we have for seeing what life was like at Oteen in it’s earliest days. Better yet, it is a collection taken and assembled by one of the nurses at the hospital revealing a little more about what it was like from a nurse’s point of view. However, like many archive finds, the names and information is missing from the record for most of the images. Who was this unidentified woman? She must have been important for Morris to include the photo in her scrapbook. It looks like a professional photo, and if you look closely she has her medical pin at the collar. For the past five years we’ve had her tucked away on our research list hoping we’d uncover her identity.
Recently, our research efforts have turned to a chronological search of articles via newspapers.com. That’s when we discovered a February 1919 Atlanta Constitutional story about the hospital that helped us finally give her a name. The article included images of the early Army Medical Detachment staff and there, staring back at us, was Head Nurse, Florence Standish.
Putting the two sources together we could now positively identify Massie-Photo-124 as Chief Nurse Florence Standish. Armed with a name, more research could be done and it turns out that US Army Hospital #19’s first Chief Nurse, Florence Standish has a remarkable life story.
Florence was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1875. From other newspaper articles we find that by 1901 she was attending a school for deaconesses in Washington, D.C. and in June 1905, she graduated from the Alsbury Hospital Training School for Nurses in Minneapolis, MN. She worked as an hourly nurse in Wilkes-Barre until September 1909 when she left to be the Nurse Superintendent of a new Methodist Deaconess Hospital in Colorado Springs, CO.
It seems that Col. Henry Hoagland had met and knew Standish in the years before WWI and so when he was named the First Medical Commanding Officer of Army Hospital #19 he hand selected her to be the Chief Nurse at his new post. We now started looking for her The Oteen, a post magazine, and found a 1918 group photo of all members of the Army Nurse Corps stationed at the hospital. Florence is seated in the second row, just left of the seam.
Her tenure at Oteen was brief but she definitely made an impact. In an Asheville Citizen Times article about the departure of both Hoagland and Standish back to Colorado, it was reported that she “has been very active as head nurse… and become very popular with all her associates at the hospital and will leave a host of friends.” Upon returning to Colorado Springs, she opened her own Sanitorium for Tuberculosis Patients. Sure enough, we found her on the 1920 federal census as owner and proprietor of TB Sanitorium with her adopted son, Robert F. Standish.
You can find more on Florence and her time in Colorado from the Colorado Springs History Museum blog https://www.cspm.org/articles/florence-standish/ but our search will continue. We’ve reached out to her grandson and will be giving you an update on what he had to say very soon.
Florence died in 1941 after a lifetime of nursing and helping others. While we may not know everything about Chief Standish, we are certainly glad to finally be able to give an unidentified face a name and highlight her story of service for Memorial Day.
Western Regional Archives 
Fantastic article!