Welcome to St. Alexis Hospital! In the frontier days, there were few jobs open for women. Mostly, women were expected to be in the home raising children or helping with all the farming chores that made up town and rural life before electricity and running water arrived to make things easier. Other than this challenging and time consuming domestic work, women could become teachers or nurses, or enter either of these professions through affiliation with religious or missionary organizations.

In frontier communities, it was often the women who noticed first the need for proper education and for places to worship, and they surely welcomed the arrival of the Catholic Order of Benedictine Sisters when they arrived in Dakota Territory in 1878 in the new town of Bismarck. The sisters originally came to teach, but soon the need for medical care gave them the opportunity to provide another essential service. In 1885, the Lamborn Hotel on the northeast corner of 6th Street and Main Avenue was sold by Alexander Mackenzie and Richard Mellon to Abbot Alexis Edelbrock, who promptly sent five Benedictine nuns from St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota out west to organize Bismarck's first hospital in the former hotel.

Imagine when a hospital building could be bought for just $30,000. The nuns did much of the work of remodeling themselves and soon opened the doors to the sick. The first year, the sisters treated 65 patients, charging $1 a day for a hospital stay. In charge then was Sister Alexa Kurst. Was the hospital named for Abbot Alexis Adelbrock or for Sister Alexa? Perhaps for both.

Early in the rough and tough days of Bismarck, injuries were often the result of drunken brawls, stabbings, gunshots and accidents with horses or fire. People did suffer from more routine ailments like diphtheria and measles, tetanus, and appendicitis, and of course, childbirth troubles. No record states just why St. Alexis treated patient Theodore Roosevelt, but he was said to have breathing troubles, so who knows? Maybe he was thrown from a horse or had the flu.

Under the direction of Sister Boniface, who took charge in 1892, the hospital was transformed into a much more modern facility with running water, electricity and steam heat. No more dirty coal stoves. St. Alexis moved out of the old Lamborn Building in 1915. An entirely new brick hospital building was erected at the corner of Rosser Avenue and Ninth Street at that time to better serve the growing community and provide more advanced medical treatments and technology. There were 125 beds to serve the region's sick. Eighteen doctors and patients were cared for by the hard working nursing sisters.

Sister Boniface retired in 1937 and died soon after. The four story nursing school, built on the east side of the old hospital in 1925, was named to honor her contributions to the community. Several major expansions of the hospital have almost completely covered the 1915 parts, but a bit of that brick building remains visible at the corner of Rosser Avenue and 9th Street.