Trinidad's Mt. San Rafael Hospital, Founded 1889, Marks Century of Care

The Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati opened a two-story, 40-bed Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad in 1889 on land donated by Dr. Barron Beshoar, a beginning that institutional records describe as the foundation of the community’s long-running health services. Msrhc records say the hospital was named “in memory of a generous benefactor of the Catholic Church, Don Rafael Chacon,” and the institution’s timeline traces expansions and educational work that tied Trinidad to regional nursing training.

Msrhc documentation highlights a 1905 milestone: the hospital opened a nursing school with five students, described in its records as “the first training school for nurses west of the Mississippi,” a program that operated until consolidation in 1932 with Glockner Hospital and St. Mary-Corwin Hospital to form the Seton School of Nursing. That early emphasis on education continued in 1955 when a school of practical nursing was organized through Trinidad State Junior College, per the hospital timeline.

Growth and community planning shaped the hospital’s immediate surroundings. Msrhc notes that in 1906 an addition “as large as the original building” was completed, and in 1907 the hospital purchased “About 2,000 lots surrounding the hospital … for ‘one dollar and other valuable considerations’” explicitly to prevent homes from being built too close to the facility. A photograph caption in the hospital’s public record archive shows “Armed strikers in front of the hospital, April 1914,” an image that signals labor tensions in the city’s early 20th-century history even as the hospital continued to expand services.

Mid-century public-health work included a physiotherapy department established to treat polio patients from 1950–1953; Msrhc records state equipment, including an Iron Lung, was on loan from the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis for that three-year period. The institution’s files record a major renovation completed in the late 1950s; Msrhc lists 1957 as the renovation year while a parallel summary lists renovations completed in 1959, a discrepancy that hospital archives could clarify.

A turning point came in 1969, when ownership changed hands and the hospital “was secularized and bought by the Trinidad Area Health Association,” according to institutional summaries. Contracts to build a new facility followed: Msrhc records show a 1971 contract to construct a complete, new 70-bed hospital and note that “the move is completed to the new Joint Commission accredited facility” in 1972, the building reported to serve as the main hospital structure today.

The hospital’s lobby holds a distinctive artifact installed in 1979: “a 2,000 pound ceramic mural, created by Sister Augusta Zimmer, SC, of Cincinnati, Ohio, is on the wall in the main lobby. The mural, depicting the history of Trinidad, was constructed in pieces and shipped to the hospital from Ohio. It is necessary to reinforce the wall in order to facilitate the weight of the mural,” Msrhc records state, underscoring the tangible links between Mt. San Rafael and its founding sisters.

Contemporary facility details in public listings note Mt. San Rafael as a private general hospital with a helipad and a Level IV trauma designation; an institutional infobox lists the hospital at coordinates 37.17306°N, -104.48750°W and gives a current bed number of 25. Wikipedia’s entry additionally claims the hospital “is notable for being a pioneer in sex-change operations, with the hospital's first of thousands of such surgeries being completed there in 1969,” a claim that appears in that summary and would merit further verification in hospital surgical and archival records.