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sometimes in use. In addition the hospital built five soup houses, a bakery, a brewery, and five ice houses.
Mr. Franklin Stearns lent the hospital his celebrated farm, ‘Tree Hill,’ for the pasturage for from one hundred to two hundred cows and from three to five hundred goats.
The latter proved to be the best subsistence we had in supplying the hospital with ‘kid’ meat, a most palatable and nutritious food for sick and convalescent patients.
Some idea of the dimensins of the bakery may be found from the fact that from seven thousand to ten thousand loaves were issued per diem, a loaf per man and attendant would not go around.
Soap was made out of grease taken from the soup houses; the lye was imported through the blockade.
An additional fact is that the hospital never drew fifty dollars from the Confederate States government, but relied solely upon the money received from commutation of rations.
The medical departments and subsistence departments were organized all to themselves, and the money from commuted rations was used to buy what was necessary.
The hospital trading canal boat, Chimborazo, Lawrence Lottier in command, plied between Richmond, Lynchburg and Lexington, bartering cotton, yarn, shoes, etc., for provisions.
This was only one of the hospital's many resources.
At the close of the war, the Confederate government owed the hospital three hundred thousand dollars, which Mr. Memminger, secretary of Confederate States treasury, agreed to pay in gold on the 29th of March, and on the 3rd of April the city of Richmond was surrendered.
Alas! it was not paid.
I now call your special attention to the fact that the total number of patients received and treated at Chimborazo Hospital amounted to seventy-six thousand (out of this number about 17,000 were wounded soldiers), and that it was the first military hospital in point of size in this country and in the world, the next largest hospital in this country being the ‘Lincoln,’ at Washington, D. C., which reported a total number of forty-six thousand patients; and the next largest in the world at large was the Scutari hospital, in the Crimea, which reported a total of thirty thousand to forty thousand patients.
The percentage of
Richmond, VA. 1908.
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