Edna Cosby
Edna "Tom" Cosby worked for over forty years as a nurse at the
Blue Ridge sanatorium starting September 6th, 1940.
The Oral Histories from the staff and patients of the Blue Ridge Sanatorium
work complied by Richard Sidebottom
This project is intended to show that the Blue Ridge Sanatorium functioned not solely as a treatment facility for patients with tuberculosis but as a close-knit community for patients, doctors, nurses and other staff members who took part in its nearly seventy years of operation. Many participants in the cure of tuberculosis at Blue Ridge commented on the sense of family that arose as they lived, worked, raised families and had fun on the Blue Ridge hillside. The following extracts from former doctors, nurses, staff members and patients (some in more than one category) illustrate the importance of Blue Ridge to their lives
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Edna Cosby
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After completing her two
years of nurses training in tuberculosis at Blue Ridge she stayed at the hospital
often working as the night supervisor until her retirement in 1982. Blue Ridge
hospital is the only place she ever worked. She recounted the following stories
as we looked through her photo albums:
"Oh yeah, that's Jabooka, he's one of mine. I had three guardian cats when
I went on night duty. Jabooka lived on the Addison and Thomas with the men,
the pavilions where the men lived. I'd go out to the end of the hospital and
I'd start to make my rounds at night. I was on 12 hour duty. At about 9 o'clock
I'd start making rounds. Jabooka would meet me, he would go with me half way
to the Trinkle Building, and Pythagoras, this gray cat, was in the Trinkle Building.
He would meet me and go with me up through the Trinkle, on each one of the fire
escapes. We had a fire escape on each side, and regardless of which floor I
went on upstairs, he'd be on that fire escape. He always knew. He'd go with
me past the Davis Building, which was the nurses home then, towards the Wright
Building and then he would stop. Blackie lived on the Wright Building and he
would meet me between there and the Wright Building. Then they'd all meet me
and take me back. Miss Martin hed been there for years, and then I came along
and they [the cats] got together and said "now this woman don't know what's
she's doing; we'll have to take care of her."
"That's the wagon and team that hauled the garbage up to the hog lot. You see we fed the hogs the extra food. And the trash that we didn't burn we had our own incinerator. And the stuff that wouldn't burn was dumped up at the hog lot… It was up the hill there[the other side of route 53 and the resevoir] and the rats would take over the pile of trash. I had a .22 rifle and the night watchman had a .22 rifle, and we used to go up there in the mornings sometimes before we went to bed and shoot rats. We had a good time shooting those rats."
"I lived in several different rooms in the Davis building before the new nurses home was built. You slept upstairs when you were in your first year and downstairs in your second year. Yeah, I lived over there [Blue Ridge] for twenty years before I moved here. It was a wonderful place to live, wonderful place to work. you always felt like you were almost in heaven, I tell you. I had a right rough life growing up. My mother died of TB when I was a baby. Grandparents raised me. My father didn't bother with me. And we were awful poor. I worked in the WPA for three years before I came in training. Then my grandparents died. In training we were all just a bunch of poor girls, most of us lived out in the country. Five of 'em had come because they had TB and couldn't get in anywhere else, and they found out that they could get in at Blue Ridge. So we were just settling in and three of the girls couldn't get their suitcases unlocked. I'd always been a tomboy and I'd always carried a knife, well sometimes. But, I had a scout knife, and I jimmied all those suitcases. So, that's where I got the nickname "Tom". I've been Tom ever since. That day Dr. Apperson examined me, he examined all of us that afternoon. Dr. Apperson found out my name. He said 'Well, my wife was a Cosby and maybe you all have some kin.' I thought, my Lord, I been made fun of, the Cosby name all my life, now somebody's tried to be kin with me. Then I met Miss Zwicker down the hall, and she put her arm around me and said 'I see that you've been a patient at Catawba.' I told her 'Yes, I was there but they never found any TB.' And she said, 'Well, I'm glad you came here instead of going to Catawba.' I thought I must have died a gone to heaven; somebody's trying to make kin with me, and somebody else is glad I got here. So I, in fourty-two years I never had any reason to change my mind about Blue Ridge. I was always treated good."
Edna Cosby: "What
are they going to do about the hospital now?"
Richard Sidebottom: "The university is thinking about putting some research
facilities there."
EC: "Well, it's going to cost an awful lot to get that place straightened
out. But why they let it go down like they did I don't know. Well, the story
goes that the only reason that they wanted it in the first place was they were
planning on building the new hospital over there; there where the barns are.
But Thomas Jefferson Foundation wouldn't let 'em. So, that took care of that."
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Hunter Yates
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In June 1940, Yates arrived at Blue Ridge after contracting tuberculosis in the Luray/Front Royal area where he was raised. He remained in the Charlottesville area after being discharged in December 1941, first operating a taxi service during World War II and then working as a driver for Charlottesville Motors on West Main Street. In 1952 he again broke down with tuberculosis and was this time sent to Catawba sanatorium, where his father had been treated in the 1910's. In April 1954 Yates traveled back to Blue Ridge for surgery at the University of Virginia remove the tubercule from his lung. After the successful procedure he took a job at Blue Ridge as he describes below. Over the next 30 years he lived on the property at Blue Ridge spending much of that time in the first of the brick apartment cottages with wife, a former patient as well.
"You slept at night and stayed in the bed during daytime. Of course if you were up and able to go to the dining room you went for all three of your meals. But there was a lot of bed resting involved. Of course when I was there the first time they didn't have this drug that they got later on. So, you just rested and they did some surgery when I was there the first time, but I was fortunate not to have to get into that."
"They wanted you to eat and they wanted you to drink plenty of milk. The milk had the calcium and that was what supposed to heal up or close up the tubercule. It didn't do away with it but it would keep it from having any leakage, and keep it from spreading."
"Some of the buildings had been taken down [between the time as a patient and time as a worker]. They had three old buildings, I was a patient on one of them called the Strode building, the was for men. Then there were two off on the far end of the east wing of the main building that's there now, and they were for the ladies. One of 'em was the Thomas and the other one was the Addison.
"The old Strode building
had what they called a wing on each end, it was a right long building. It was
stuccoed and wood frame. And there were nine beds in this large room that was
on the end of the Strode that I was in, so you could talk. One thing they wouldn't
allow you to do was in the evening they had what they called a rest period.
It started at two o'clock and went 'til about four. Everybody was supposed to
be quiet, and if you wanted to sleep, fine, but you couldn't read the newspaper
because that would disturb the people that wanted to sleep."
Richard Sidebottom: Did you look forward to the mealtime as a time to see people
from the other wards?
Hunter Yates: "Oh yes. They had a large dining room. Lord knows how many
people could sit in there… In the main dining room, at least the one I
was eating in, half of it was for the men and then the other half was for the
women. All in the same dining room… There wasn't much flirting going on.
RS: Then, how did you meet your wife?
HY: She was a patient there but not back when I was a patient.
RS: When you were working?
HY: I hadn't gotten transferred to the post office when we met. I was still
picking up the laundry for the patients when I met her.
"In the winter time, when it snowed they had a roll up canvas that covered the porch which was screened in. They would roll the canvas down so that snow didn't blow on the porch. At night time you had to get out of your room, pull the bed out and get out on the porch. They had some kind of stone, about this big, at least six inches in diameter, and up at the top they had an opening with a rubber stopper in it. You'd go to where the hot water was and fill that thing full of hot water and put the rubber stopper in. You had to do a pretty good job of putting that stopper in there because if it came out you'd have a wet bed… It was mainly for your feet, to keep them warm."
"A friend of mine was working at Blue Ridge at the time, and he would visit me occasionally while I was at Catawba. He was on the job one evening and he was pretty much on cloud nine; he'd been drinking pretty heavy. So, they fired him and that left an opening, so I went in to see if I could get the job and I did. I spent thirty years at Blue Ridge as an employee."
"My first job there was orderly work. I worked on one ward there for 16 years… that was the second floor of the West Wing. Then the man who was running the store there for the benefit of patients that couldn't go to town or weren't allowed to go whatever the case may be, this fella had a heart attack and passed right along. The medical director and superintendent asked me if I would take his place as store manager and clerk of the post office there. That sounded much better than working on the ward, and so I accepted it. I spent 14 years in the post office over there"
"They decided to retire me… October of '84. What happened was, I must not have looked as old as my age was really. So, I was supposed to have left there when I reached 65. But, I didn't leave 'til I was well passed 67. I got two years on 'em. I didn't want to go, but back at that time, I guess it was pretty well known that if you could do your job, you could work until you were 70 before you had to retire. I think that was state policy. So, one day the secretary of the Medical Director and Superintendent came down to get their mail, she brought the question up of my age at the time. I was honest about it. It wasn't long then before the wheels started turning to end my time there."
"There were a lot of people that worked there and, of course, there were a lot of patients there at one time. I guess you might say it was a little town to itself."
Rebecca Harrup
After arriving Blue Ridge Sanatorium in 1948 as a nurse's aide, Rebecca Harrup
enrolled in the nursing program and graduated in 1951. Like many of her fellow
graduates, she remained at Blue Ridge as a worker after her course work. While
there, she met her former husband, a patient, and resided in one of the family
cottages. She retired from the hospital in 1987. Raised in Culpepper County,
Virginia, Ms. Harrup talked about the opportunity work at Blue Ridge brought
and the role of the nurse in the treatment of the disease. She said the following
about working with tuberculosis and the uses of medication in healthcare.
"When I was about nineteen, I was admitting a patient one day and they said, 'Aren't you afraid to work here' and I said 'Well, no, I know what everyone here has,' which is certainly not the case in a general hospital. I've always said I never was afraid of it [tuberculosis], and I still have never had any fear that that's something that will take me away from here."
"I guess it's like human nature. When you think you can depend on medications you don't do all the things you could do to help yourself. So, I think it was wonderful that they did get medications that would work against the TB germ; it's not something they had for a long time… Something they insisted on from the very beginning was that we taught our patients. How to keep from infecting other people, even simple things like covering their mouths when the coughed or sneezed… We would gather all of the patients in the solarium and we would talk to them. Sometimes someone would come in from the lab and show them what the tests were like and what it [the germ] looked like growing. They learned about the disease."
Martha Coleman
Born and raised in southwest Virginia, Scott County, Martha Coleman came to
Blue Ridge specifically for the nursing education. A friend who was already
in training at the sanatorium suggested she apply. She stressed the strength
of the curriculum at Blue Ridge in preparing her for her additional training
at MCV. After completing RN training in Richmond she married her former husband,
a minister, and moved around often. In 1970, she decided to move with her children
back to Blue Ridge where she worked until retiring in 1995.
"I went in [upon arriving] and I was welcomed. It was like a god-send to me, the place was, because they enveloped me in their caring and I developed friendships in my class. We were a pretty close-knit class. I thoroughly enjoyed my studies… Down where I come from people were very poor, and when I looked at Stafford Hall it looked like a mansion to me; the beautiful floors, they kept it impecable. All of the rooms were so nice. I had been used to sharing a room with four people. The floor was so warm you didn't have to get up and make your fire. It was just beautiful."
"They really were always wanting to feed us. When I came to Blue Ridge they always kept our little solarium stocked with food. I'll never forget when I went back home for Christmas time and I had put on about twenty pounds and nobody hardly knew me. They wanted us to drink all of the milk and really eat the rich food, what they called the healthy food but sometimes it was very fattening too. All of the patients were so thin, so they needed that food but most of us didn't."
"I came back [in 1970]
and took the apartment and the job. I lived on the grounds for over thirteen
years. It worked out very well. The last part of my career I spent as evening
supervisor. My children, when I ask them where is the place that they liked
to live the most, because we lived in many different places, they say Blue Ridge.
They just loved being there. I thought they might feel isolated, and maybe hate
it, but they loved it. There were enough children around that they school bus
stopped right in front of our house. They had enough people that they could
relate to."
Sinclair and Mrs. Payne
When he started work at Blue Ridge Hospital in Dec 1948, Sinclair Payne was
looking for a steady income. He had grown up in Fluvanna County and at the time
was working cutting pulpwood when the weather was right. In June of 1951 he
left Blue Ridge for the army where he worked as a medical technician in a MASH
unit during the Korean War. He returned in 1953 to work again as an orderly
before being promoted to assistant and eventually manager of the medical storeroom.
In 1971, he married, ___, a nursing attendant who also talked with me. Sinclair
retired from Blue Ridge September 30, 1991 after 31 years of work there.
"In the mornings,
I'd go around to the assigned building, which in this case was the Strode, one
of the outer buildings, and I'd go over and get the trash and everything out.
By then it was time it was time to go to the infirmary and serve the trays.
Then we'd go back to the building (Strode), where we had about twenty patients.
Some of 'em had walking time; 15 minutes in the morning or 15 minutes in the
evening maybe, or fifteen minutes in the morning and none in the evening. And
then we'd go clean up; clean in the bathrooms, normal janitorial stuff. One
of the nurses would come over there; they wouldn't stay but they'd be in charge
of the building. They'd come along and check us out and we'd work under them.
They'd tell us what they wanted done and we'd do it.
"I moved from Blue Ridge in 1971 when we got married… They would only
keep certain types of workers [living on grounds]. In other words they wanted
to keep people, like plumbers, that would need to go in the middle of the night.
They called them essential maintenance people. Of course doctors, and maintenance
workers, and so on. I put in an application and it got denied. Anyway, he told
me there was no guarantee I'd get it because they were looking for people that
did that type of work and of course they wouldn't need me in the middle of the
night. I was in the stewards office at that time."
"On the hill before they put all those pines in there (of course that's why they put them up there, cause they quit farming and they got rid of the cows), but where the barn is they had cornfields. They used to fill the silos. That red dirt was rich as could be, they had some big corn…"
"We all got along very good. We always referred to us as "Blue Ridge Family."
_____ Payne worked for 16 years as a nurses attendant at the Blue Ridge Sanatorium. She moved to Charlottesville in 1964 from Beckley, West Virginia where she had previously worked as a nurse. While working on the wards at Blue Ridge she got to know her future husband Sinclair. The two have been married now for 31 years.
"We worked together and we passed each other along the way. So, we knew each other about eight or nine years before we were married. Finally, one day we decided to get married… It wasn't really a courtship, it was more knowing each other."
"We used to think that was the most beautiful land up around the hospital… It's amazing that it has sat as long as it has without being used for something beneficial because it's a beautiful place. All the grass was cut and the trees were trimmed, it was beautiful."
Martha Bibb
Martha Bibb originally registered for nursing school at the University of Virginia
but instead began training at Blue Ridge in 1947 and remained a nurse there
until 1988. Coming from Isle of Wight County, Virginia, Mrs. Bibb feels a particularly
strong attachment to the hospital as was evident in her stories.
"I went to Blue Ridge in 1947 in September. Well, actually I signed up to go to the University, and there was a shadow, or they thought there was a shadow on the lung [x-ray]. So, they suggested that I go to Blue Ridge and get checked out. So, I had a little bit of experience as a patient for three months, which thankfully proved to be just a shadow on the x-ray. I went through all the courses and so forth, the usual routine. I was a little bit spoiled because of my parents, so the first part was a little hard… But, everybody was kind, everybody was good to me, they new that I was having a struggle. So, they all kind of pampered me for a little while before I got into the swing of things. Then I met Tom, that's Edna Cosby, and she took me under her wing and from there on she has been my second mom."
"After I got through with training and the usual routine of day duty and night duty, I met a patient. I was seeing him on the side. And eventually he came to work and I was his supervisor, and eventually we got married… He has passed on, but I have a duplicate of him in my son.
"We still are very close-knit. When something goes wrong with one of us, it's just like a chain, we notify the others. We are still a family. We meet each year and have a picnic. We average a little over a hundred most every year. A lot of 'em don't even live around here...We support each other. It's not like when you retire you go your way and the rest of the people you worked with go their way. I had been married for about seven years when I lost my husband and you could not ask for any more support than I got. I had gone back to my home at that time because I had two small children, an 18 month old and one that wasn't quite three. My family didn't feel like I could handle them by myself. But I also had my Blue Ridge family that I got notes and encouragement from… Miss LaFon, who was our director of nurses at that time, and Dr. Pearson, who was our superintendent, gave me notes saying whenever I felt fit to come back to get back in contact with them and that I had a place if I wanted to work. "