Appalachian Figures
Most people today know Rush Hospital in Meridian as Ochsner Rush Medical Center, a regional facility with hundreds of beds serving east central Mississippi and western Alabama. That big city hospital has its roots in a much smaller place: Kemper County, Mississippi, a rural Appalachian county just up the road from Meridian.
Its founding doctor, Jesse Hackley “J. H.” Rush, was born in those Kemper hills in 1868 and began his career not as a physician but as a small town dentist. From that Appalachian borderland he built Meridian’s first private hospital in 1915, an 18 bed infirmary that grew into a teaching hospital, a charitable institution, and eventually a modern medical center.
This article traces Dr. Rush’s path from Kemper County to Meridian, follows the early years of Rush’s Infirmary through primary records, and looks at how an Appalachian born doctor helped transform medical care in the “Queen City” and its surrounding counties.
Kemper County Roots
Jesse Hackley Rush was born on 6 September 1868 in Kemper County, Mississippi, the son of William Vaughn Rush Jr. and Julia Key. Genealogical reconstructions based on census and vital records place the family near De Kalb, the county seat.
Kemper County sits on the far western edge of the Appalachian highlands. The Appalachian Regional Commission classifies it as one of Mississippi’s Appalachian counties, and modern county documents routinely invoke ARC support in local development plans. Geologists place Kemper in a transition zone between the Gulf Coastal Plain and the foothills of the Appalachian Plateau, where low ridges and “hills and hollers” stretch southward out of Alabama.
By the late nineteenth century, the Rush family name appears not only in Kemper County land and census records but also in religious and civic life. A “J. H. Rush, M.G.” records marriages in Lauderdale County marriage books in the 1870s, and Baptist denominational histories list a J. H. Rush on state level committees. These earlier Rush figures were probably relatives rather than Jesse himself, yet they show the family already active in church and community leadership in the region where Kemper, Lauderdale, and nearby counties meet.
Growing up in that setting, young Jesse Rush came of age in a Reconstruction era landscape that combined small farms, timber, and scattered crossroad towns. De Kalb and other Kemper communities looked south to Meridian for rail connections, banking, and specialized services. As an adult, Rush would follow the same road.
From De Kalb to Meridian: Dentist Turned Doctor
By the turn of the twentieth century, city directories and later biographies place J. H. Rush in Meridian working not yet as a doctor, but as a dentist. Dentistry gave him an early foothold in Meridian’s professional class at a moment when the town was booming on rail traffic and timber money.
In 1910, at age 42, Rush completed a late career pivot. He graduated with highest honors from Mississippi Medical College, then based in Jackson but with roots in Meridian’s earlier medical school. After medical school he undertook further surgical training at the New York Polyclinic in New York City, one of the era’s important postgraduate centers.
On his return to Mississippi, Rush helped organize the Meridian Sanitarium, one of seven founders named in later summaries. That early venture brought him into collaboration with other Meridian physicians attempting to move hospital care in east Mississippi beyond small clinics, charity wards, and home visits.
Founding Rush’s Infirmary, 1915
The decisive step came in 1915. Multiple institutional histories, biographies of Rush’s son Leslie, and local features agree that on 15 February 1915, J. H. Rush opened “Rush’s Infirmary,” an 18 bed hospital that was the first private hospital in Meridian.
A later summary of Rush’s life explains that when the infirmary opened, the staff consisted of Dr. and Mrs. Rush, one registered nurse, and six student nurses. It was a family operation in the literal sense. Rush’s wife, Mary Cornelia Hunnicutt Rush, worked closely with him in running the institution. Their sons H. Lowry and Leslie would join the staff as physicians in the 1920s.
A remarkable real photo postcard, now circulating in the collectors’ market, shows what that first infirmary looked like. The card, captioned “MERIDIAN MS 1915 rppc ‘NEW’ RUSH INFIRMARY & STAFF,” portrays a modest two story building with the staff posed out front. The dealer description identifies it as an unposted sepia real photo postcard, almost certainly produced to commemorate the opening of the new 18 bed facility.
Another artifact, an antique “RUSH’S INFIRMARY” pin or stamping die, links the institution’s name to the physical badges worn by staff or used to mark hospital property. Together these pieces of material culture remind us that the infirmary was not only a set of rooms and beds, but also an emerging brand in Meridian’s crowded downtown.
Within a decade, national medical surveys were taking notice. JAMA’s recurring “Hospital Service in the United States” reports listed Rush’s Infirmary in the Mississippi section as a general hospital for Meridian. A 1926 survey shows it with around 60 beds, suggesting significant growth from the original 18. By 1941, the AMA’s official register again listed “Rush’s Infirmary” as a general hospital, with notes about its nursing school and accreditation.
A Teaching Hospital and Nursing School
From the beginning, Rush’s Infirmary served not only patients but also students. The staff of six student nurses recorded in 1915 grew into a formal training program that the American Journal of Nursing tracked in its regular “News about Nursing” columns. In the 1930s and 1940s, AJN items noted that “Rush’s Infirmary School of Nursing, Meridian, Miss.” had organized, and later mentioned graduates working in supervisory roles or continuing their education.
One of the most vivid first person accounts comes from an oral history pamphlet preserved at the Lauderdale County Department of Archives and History, “Now As I Remember…”. In it, a nurse who entered Rush Hospital in 1926 recalls a three year training program and remembers that after graduation, Dr. Rush personally sent her to Memphis to study x ray and laboratory work. That small detail captures him not only as a surgeon but as a mentor willing to invest in advanced education for his staff.
By mid century, Rush trained nurses were appearing far from Meridian. Indiana University School of Nursing bulletins from the 1950s list faculty member Virginia Harriett Walker as a “Graduate, Rush Infirmary School of Nursing (Meridian, Miss.), 1934,” before she went on to earn degrees from the University of Tennessee and the University of Chicago. The career of a Rush graduate who became a leader in nursing service at a major Midwestern university suggests that the small Mississippi program had a reputation that reached well beyond the state.
Family history and orthopedic literature also highlight the hospital’s role in developing specialized medicine. Leslie Vaughn Rush, the youngest son, joined his father’s staff in 1927 and later developed the “Rush pin,” a flexible intramedullary nail that revolutionized fracture care and remains in use in modified form. His innovations depended on having access to an operating room, surgical staff, and a patient base at his father’s hospital.
In 1944, long after J. H. Rush’s death, Leslie partnered with nurse Catherine Hovious and Meridian Public Schools superintendent H. M. Ivey to create the first combined junior college and hospital nursing program in Mississippi, using Meridian Junior College and Rush Hospital as anchors. That project built on decades of earlier nurse training at Rush’s Infirmary and tied the institution more firmly into regional education networks that served students from Kemper and other Appalachian counties.
Charity Wards, Segregation, and Community Work
The best snapshot of how Rush’s hospital operated in the 1930s comes from an unlikely source: a tax case. In 1937, the family reorganized the hospital as the Rush Hospital Benevolent Association, a nonprofit corporation. When Lauderdale County officials assessed property taxes, the association claimed exemption under a Mississippi statute that covered hospitals operating without profit and maintaining charity wards. The dispute went all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
In its 1940 opinion, the court summarized testimony about how the hospital worked. It noted that throughout 1938 the hospital maintained two charity wards, “one for white patients and the other for colored,” and that when these were full, charity patients were placed in rooms normally used for paying patients. All of the income from the hospital and the nurses’ home, the court found, was used for the operation of those facilities and “no part of same for profit.”
The charter of the Benevolent Association, quoted in the same case, makes the nonprofit purpose explicit. It describes a general hospital in Meridian “for the care of the sick, injured and infirm,” along with operating rooms, x ray equipment, and “a training school for nurses,” and specifies that “no profit or gain shall be made from the operation of said hospital and nurses’ home,” which must always maintain one or more charity wards.
These details show Rush’s Infirmary as both a business and a charitable institution, deeply entangled with Jim Crow. Black patients did receive hospital care there, but in a separate charity ward, and the court made no effort to challenge that segregation. At the same time, the case confirms that by the late 1930s the hospital was treated under state law as an organization serving the public good rather than a private, profit making clinic.
City directories and genealogical compilations offer another window into the hospital’s place in Meridian’s working class neighborhoods. “The Brogan Families of Early America,” a study built from directory and census entries, traces an African American laborer, Solomon Brogan, who worked as a porter for Rush’s Infirmary and later as a hospital janitor in the 1940s and 1950s. His wife Annice appears as a maid in the same area, with addresses along 16th and 32nd Avenues near the hospital. Their story reminds us that Rush’s Infirmary was also an employer for Black workers from Meridian and surrounding rural communities.
Professional directories, meanwhile, show the hospital’s doctors engaged in regular peer meetings. The statewide periodical “Mississippi Doctor” listed “Rush’s Infirmary: First Friday, each month, 7:30 p.m.” as a standing meeting time, with similar notices for other hospitals. Those scheduled staff meetings hint at a growing culture of organized medical practice in Meridian, with Rush’s Infirmary as one of the hubs.
Glimpses from Bills and Reports
Occasionally the hospital appears in unexpected federal paperwork. A 1940 report of the United States Senate’s Committee on Claims, Calendar No. 1903, deals with compensation for the death of a child injured by a government vehicle in rural Mississippi. The supporting documents include a statement from Rush’s Infirmary detailing a hospital bill of $6.50 for the boy’s short stay, alongside charges from Rush Brothers Clinic and a local funeral home.
That small line item, buried in a Senate report, tells us several things. Rush’s Infirmary was still operating under that name decades after J. H. Rush’s death. It handled emergency admissions from the surrounding countryside. Its charges were significant enough to matter in a federal compensation claim, but still modest on an absolute scale.
Other state reports, including an East Mississippi State Hospital biennial report, note patients who “expired at Rush’s Infirmary,” showing that even people under the care of other institutions were sometimes transferred there for acute medical treatment.
Death of Dr. Rush and the Hospital’s Afterlife
On 22 January 1931, Dr. J. H. Rush died at 5:15 p.m. in his own hospital at the age of 62. Obituaries in the Sumter County Journal of York, Alabama, and the Choctaw Advocate of Butler, Alabama, preserved in microfilm and extracted in later references, mourned him as “one of the leading physicians and surgeons in Mississippi” and listed his surviving wife, daughter, and sons, Drs. Lowry and Leslie Rush.
Family history sites, drawing on cemetery and vital records, confirm his burial in Meridian and emphasize that he founded “the first private hospital in Meridian,” a facility that continued under family direction.
In 1947, the reorganized Rush Hospital Benevolent Association renamed the institution Rush Memorial Hospital in honor of its founder. By that time, the American College of Surgeons year book listed “Rush’s Infirmary, Meridian” among Mississippi hospitals approved by the college, with its nursing school accredited by the state board of nurse examiners.
Later institutional histories and vendor case studies track the hospital’s gradual expansion into a modern acute care facility. By the late twentieth century it operated as Rush Foundation Hospital, a roughly 200 bed hospital serving east central Mississippi. In 2022, Rush Health Systems merged with Ochsner Health to form Ochsner Rush Health, continuing the Rush name in partnership with a larger regional system.
From a Kemper County dentist turned surgeon to a multi hospital system, the line of continuity is not always straight, but it is remarkably unbroken.
Why This Story Belongs in Appalachian History
At first glance, a Meridian hospital might seem far outside the Appalachian story. Yet its founder came out of Kemper County, which the Appalachian Regional Commission includes in its official Appalachian footprint. The county lies in a band of uplands that geologists link to the Appalachian Plateau, and local historians and residents regularly describe its culture in Appalachian terms.
For people in Kemper, Neshoba, and other nearby counties, Meridian was the nearest city with rail lines, specialty shops, and hospital care. As Rush’s Infirmary grew, it drew patients, student nurses, and employees from these Appalachian border counties. Genealogical notes show rural young people taking jobs as porters, maids, and student nurses at the hospital. Oral histories from Rush nurses describe being sent from Meridian to Memphis and other cities for advanced training, then returning to serve in east Mississippi.
Seen from this angle, Dr. Rush’s life and hospital are part of a broader Appalachian pattern. A child of a rural hill county used education to step into a larger professional world. He then built an institution in a regional trading town that served both city dwellers and the rural counties around them. Rush’s Infirmary became a place where Appalachian families went for surgery, where their daughters trained as nurses, and where Black workers from nearby neighborhoods found jobs in an era of limited opportunities.
For Appalachian history, the story of Rush and his infirmary reminds us that the region’s medical past is not only about coal camp doctors or country midwives, but also about the small city hospitals that knit together rural counties and urban centers. In the shadow of today’s Ochsner Rush Medical Center, the Appalachian roots of that story still matter.
Sources & Further Reading
“Dr. J. H. Rush passes away.” Sumter County Journal (York, Alabama), 29 January 1931, p. 1. Obituary of Dr. Jesse Hackley Rush, describing him as one of Mississippi’s leading physicians and surgeons. Wikipedia
“Death Takes Dr. J. H. Rush.” The Choctaw Advocate (Butler, Alabama), 28 January 1931. Companion obituary emphasizing his regional reputation and listing surviving family. Wikipedia+1
Rush Hospital Benevolent Association v. Board of Supervisors of Lauderdale County, 187 Miss. 204, 192 So. 829 (Miss. 1940). Mississippi Supreme Court opinion summarizing the nonprofit charter of Rush Hospital Benevolent Association and detailing its charity wards and nurses’ home. vLex
“Hospital Service in the United States.” Journal of the American Medical Association 86 (1926) and subsequent annual surveys; “Hospitals Registered by the American Medical Association,” JAMA 116 (1941). National hospital directories listing Rush’s Infirmary as a general hospital in Meridian, with bed counts and notes on its nursing school and accreditation. Internet Archive+3JAMA Network+3JAMA Network+3
Lauderdale County Department of Archives & History, Now As I Remember… Oral history of a nurse who entered Rush Hospital in 1926, describing the three year training program and Dr. Rush’s support for advanced x ray and laboratory study in Memphis. lauderdalecountymsarchives.org+1
Indiana University School of Nursing bulletins, 1950s. Faculty biographies noting Virginia Harriett Walker as “Graduate, Rush Infirmary School of Nursing (Meridian, Miss.), 1934,” evidence that Rush’s nursing school fed into national academic nursing. IU Indianapolis eArchives+1
“News about Nursing” and related notes in American Journal of Nursing (various issues). Announcements and brief items about Rush’s Infirmary School of Nursing, including its organization and the careers of its graduates. JSTOR+4JSTOR+4JSTOR+4
United States Senate, 76th Congress, Calendar No. 1903, Report No. 1815 (1940). Claims report for the estate of Thomas Gerald Brieger, including an itemized bill that lists “Rush’s Infirmary, hospital bill $6.50” and charges from Rush Brothers Clinic, documenting treatment costs and confirming operation of the infirmary after Dr. Rush’s death. GovInfo+1
Real photo postcard “MERIDIAN MS 1915 rppc ‘NEW’ RUSH INFIRMARY & STAFF, LAUDERDALE Co MISSISSIPPI,” WorthPoint listing. Unposted sepia postcard showing the early staff and building of Rush’s Infirmary, a rare visual record of the institution’s beginnings. WorthPoint+2WorthPoint+2
Antique “RUSH’S INFIRMARY” hospital pin or stamping die, WorthPoint listing. Material culture evidence tying the Rush name to hospital regalia. WorthPoint
“The Brogan Families of Early America,” genealogical PDF. Uses Meridian city directories to document Solomon Brogan as a porter and later janitor at Rush’s Infirmary, and his wife Annice as a maid, illustrating the hospital’s role as an employer in its neighborhood. daniel.brogan.name+1
“J. H. Rush” and “Leslie Rush,” Wikipedia. Concise biographies summarizing J. H. Rush’s transition from dentist to physician, the 1915 founding of Rush’s Infirmary, later renaming to Rush Memorial and Rush Foundation Hospital, and Leslie Rush’s development of the Rush pin and partnership with Meridian Junior College. Wikipedia+1
Find a Grave memorials for Dr. Jesse Hackley Rush and Dr. Leslie Vaughn Rush. Genealogical summaries situating the Rush family in Kemper and Lauderdale Counties and confirming the family’s multi generational medical practice at Rush’s hospital. Find A Grave+2Find A Grave+2
Rush Health Systems and Ochsner Rush Medical Center institutional histories, including community health needs assessments and local business profiles. Short narratives of the hospital’s growth from an 18 bed infirmary in 1915 to a modern regional medical center and its 2022 merger with Ochsner. Facebook+3ochsnerrush.org+3Congress.gov+3
Mississippi Encyclopedia entry on Kemper County and ARC documentation on Mississippi’s Appalachian counties. Context for understanding Kemper County as part of the Appalachian region and for situating Dr. Rush’s birthplace within Appalachia’s western edge. Appalachian Regional Commission+3Mississippi Encyclopedia+3kempercounty.com+3