Traveling the Way of Love:

Sarah Hunter’s Loving Service
for Saint Agnes’ Hospital

By Lynn Hoke, Archivist,
the Diocese of North Carolina

Today we might call them an Episcopal Church power couple – Sarah Lothrop Hunter and the Rev. Aaron Burtis Hunter. These two were married in January 1888 in New York, then moved almost immediately to Raleigh. They made their home on the campus of Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, now called Saint Augustine’s University, on Oakwood Avenue. Here Dr. Hunter served first as Vice-Principal and instructor in theology, then as Principal from 1891 to 1916. His own story is remarkable – but this year’s ECW history focus will feature Sarah, the Woman’s Auxiliary and Saint Agnes’ Hospital.

“Mrs. Hunter” first appeared in the 1891 Diocesan Woman’s Auxiliary annual report as a representative for Saint Augustine’s School. By the next year an Auxiliary branch had been organized among the pupils, and by 1894 “Mrs. A. B. Hunter” was Directress of the school’s Girls Friendly Guild. The Woman’s Auxiliary became and remained a major part of Sarah’s story.

When she noted a great need for hospital facilities “for Negroes in the Raleigh area,” Sarah determined to do something about it. The Hunters traveled together to the 1895 General Convention meeting in Minneapolis, where Sarah addressed the Triennial Meeting of the Woman’s Auxiliary. She first described the urgency of the need, then made her first plea for funds to support a hospital on the Saint Augustine’s campus. The result was two gifts, one from the Woman’s Auxiliary in the sum of $500.00. The other was in the amount of $600.00 from a Mr. I. L. Collins of Orange, California, in memory of his wife, Agnes Collins. Thus arose the oft repeated statement that “Saint Agnes Hospital was founded with faith, love and $1100.00.”*

The former home of the school’s past president served as the hospital’s first building. A Training School for Nurses was always part of the plan and the first class of two nurses graduated in April 1898. Many of the staff nurses and physicians, including Dr. Catherine P. Hayden, Dr. Jeanne A. Duncan and Dr. Mary V. Glenton, were funded over the years by the United Offering, known after 1920 as the United Thank Offering. In 1928 the National Woman’s Auxiliary provided a $30,000.00 gift for a new Nurses Home. Over the years, many individuals and Auxiliary branches, both in North Carolina and elsewhere, help fund the building, re-building and operations of Saint Agnes’ Hospital.

Dr. Hunter reported about “Mrs. Hunter” to the School in 1909: “The care of her household, which includes three of the teachers and often other visitors, would be enough for an ordinary woman; but in addition to that, she has the superintendency and entire financial responsibility of Saint Agnes’ Hospital and Training School for Nurses and she is my bookkeeper for the school, keeping at least 200 accounts of mine, and many more of her own. She has charge of all the missionary boxes and missionary store and the correspondence connected with them. She is in charge of the Sunday School, of the mothers’ meeting, gives occasional counsel in working and sewing departments, and is resorted to generally by everybody who has any questions to be answered or difficulty to be solved.”* Loving service, indeed!

For more of the Sarah Hunter/Saint Agnes’ story – with an update on the future of the former hospital’s historic site – you are invited to stop by the Annual Meeting exhibit area.

* Both quotes from W. Montague Cobb, M.D., “Saint Agnes’ Hospital, Raleigh North Carolina, 1896-1961,” Journal of the National Medical Association 53 (September 1961), 441; 446.