Qualla: Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children

Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the summer of 1936, polio paralyzed roughly four thousand American children. There were no vaccines. Treatment meant immobilization in plaster casts, hot Sister Kenny packs, iron lungs for the worst cases, and physical therapy that could last years. The Works Progress Administration that same year completed a limestone hospital in Milton, West Virginia, built specifically for young polio patients: Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children. For twenty-four years, children came here to recover - or to learn to live with bodies the virus had remade. The hospital closed in 1960, three years after the Salk vaccine entered widespread use. The building, which has been empty since 2009, still stands on its hilltop above U.S. Route 60, its limestone walls and copper-domed cupola weathering quietly into the West Virginia rain.

Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children: A New Deal Hospital

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Works Progress Administration built a remarkable amount of America's twentieth-century civic infrastructure: post offices, schools, libraries, parks, courthouses, hospitals. The Morris Memorial commission fit neatly into the agency's mission. Polio was an emergency the countr...

Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children: Polio Wards

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Polio in the pre-vaccine era was a slow, frightening disease for the families who lived through it. The virus typically struck children, attacked the central nervous system, and could paralyze any combination of limbs, the diaphragm, or the muscles needed to swallow. Treatment wa...

Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children: The End of an Epidemic

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was licensed in April 1955 after the largest medical trial in American history confirmed its effectiveness. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine followed in 1961. American polio cases collapsed within a decade. By 1960, Morris Memorial Hospital for C...

Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children: Preservation Without a Purpose

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In May 2013, Morris Memorial was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination form, prepared by Jean Boger in late 2012, describes a remarkably intact example of a Colonial Revival WPA hospital. Listing on the National Register does not save a building. It do...