“An Institution of Organized Kindness”

In June of 1894, inspired by tales of marvelous progress in medicine at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, a small group of Lutheran clergy and laymen banded together to form a hospital association. They organized Sioux Falls Hospital located in the Seney House on the northeast corner of Fourth Street and Menlo Avenue. It was the only hospital in Sioux Falls for several years. At that time hospitals were considered a place one went to die. For this reason the first patient to enter Sioux Falls Hospital pleaded to be taken instead to the facilities at the State Penitentiary!

The Hospital moved to the Cameron House at the northwest corner of Tenth Street and Dakota Avenue in 1896. Soon it added the first formal nursing program in South Dakota, the Sioux Falls Training School for Nurses. This school, which became the Sioux Valley Hospital School of Nursing, closed in 1986, 2120 graduates later.

A larger building was soon needed. Land was purchased on the northwest corner of 19th Street and Minnesota Avenue and a frame two story 20 bed hospital was constructed 1900. This first building in South Dakota to be built specifically as a hospital was named Sioux Falls Lutheran Hospital. After several successful years, two unforeseen events placed heavy financial and physical burdens upon the new hospital. During World War I, medicines and supplies of many of which were diverted for the war effort, became extremely costly and in short supply.

Secondly, the deadly Spanish Influenza of 1918 brought scores of flu victims to the hospital making it necessary to put patients in the corridors, in offices, and even in the parlor. Many of these flu victims were also unable to pay for their hospital services.

The hospital successfully weathered the crisis and later merged with Moe Hospital in 1925. Shortly thereafter the name was changed to Sioux Valley Hospital which became known from then on as a community hospital.

A drive began in 1927 to raise funds to build a much larger new hospital building. A booklet entitled ‘An Institution of Organized Kindness’ was distributed which explained the need for a new modern facility. Construction began in March of 1929 in the middle of a corn field at the outer edge of Sioux Falls at what is now 18th Street and Euclid Avenue. The stock market crash in October and the depression which followed stalled progress on the building. With generous community support, however, it was completed and opened in 1930

In 1994, 100 years after its modest beginning, Sioux Valley Hospital was named one of America’s 100 best-performing general acute care hospitals. It continues today as ‘An Institution of Organized Kindness.'

Minnehaha County, 18th Street and Euclid Avenue, Sioux Falls (2006)