Old Post Sanitarium

Duane's take

The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Way out here in Garza County, before there was much of anything else to count on, somebody decided this part of West Texas needed a real hospital. Not a back room, not a traveling doctor with a bag and a prayer, but an actual hospital.

And the man behind it was C. W. Post, the cereals millionaire, building it through his Double U Company in 1912.

First hospital in this part of West Texas. That's not a small thing to put on a sign. Now, when C.

W. Post's outfit decided to do something, they didn't do it halfway. This place had an X-ray laboratory at a time when most of the country hadn't seen one outside a big city.

It had operating rooms. Sterilizing rooms. A diet kitchen.

Nurses got their training right there on site. Every single room was private, which was a luxury in any era. And they ran steam heat through the whole building, so when a West Texas winter came howling across that flat open land, the patients inside were warm.

The finest facilities, the marker says, and looking at that list, it's hard to argue. C. W.

Post put a piece of the modern world down in the middle of the high plains, and for the people out here, that wasn't just a building. That was the difference between here and somewhere far away.

What the marker says

First hospital in this part of West Texas. Built in 1912 by Double U Company of C. W. Post, cereals millionaire. Finest facilities: X-ray laboratory, operating and sterilizing rooms, nurses' training, diet kitchen, all rooms private, with steam heat. Recorded Texas Historic Landmak, 1964.