Marking Pennsylvania History

Stretchers and Shopping Carts

One of the most enduring images of the Vietnam War, for me, originated not from the steamy jungles of Southeast Asia, but from the rolling hills outside Philadelphia.

Shortly after the war, a friend who had served at the Valley Forge Army Hospital described the arrival of wounded. As in all wars, casualties were in a range of conditions. Soldiers arrived from halfway around the world, in helicopters and transport planes, on stretchers, often still wearing their Army-issued black leather boots. In the treads, my friend remembered, was caked mud from the battlefield, often with clods of still-living grass.

Over the centuries, Philadelphia served as a center for military medical facilities. The Valley Forge Army Hospital, which closed in 1974 after 31 years, was a major chapter in a long-line of hospitals that treated hundreds of thousands of casualties and veterans. Its story is remarkable, but in terms of scale and service, nothing compares to the medical roll played by Philadelphia during the Civil War.

In the early 1860s, wounded arrived at the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad at Broad Street and Washington Avenue and were processed at the adjacent Citizens Volunteer Hospital before being moved to one of several temporary hospitals that ringed the city, including the sprawling Mower General Hospital in Chestnut Hill.

Mower, like the other one-story wooden temporary hospitals built along Philadelphia's commuter train lines. But Mower was larger, its served more that 50,000 wounded Union Soldiers from its opening in September 1862 to August 1865, when it was closed and emptied. In the 1860s, as in the 1960s, wounded were brought in on stretchers, their boots doubtless still holding onto the mud from battlefields were the soldiers fell.

This image comes to mind as I visit the site of Mower General Hospital. Today, civilians tend to their daily lives at a supermarket, a video store, and other shops. There are no wards, no wounded, and no medical personnel, and, except for a blue and yellow state historical marker, no public memory of the hospital. As shoppers roll their carts by with sacks of groceries, I think about the stretchers and the wounded, and how knowing something about the layers of time adds immeasurably to the sense of place.

- Kenneth FInkel, Executive Director of WHYY's Arts & Culture Service

Return to Marking Pennsylvania History homepage.