‘Public is furious.’ KY county upset over talk of moving Frontier Nursing buildings.
There’s no way to separate trailblazing nurse-midwife Mary Breckinridge from the last 100 years of Leslie County’s history, so when talk arose that the owner of her historic house might move it out of the county, people got hot.
Breckinridge, motivated by the death of her two young children, started working in the mountainous coal county in the 1920s to provide health care for mothers and babies in what was then an isolated corner of Appalachia, with infant death rates among the highest in the nation.
Roads weren’t well developed, so the nurses initially rode horses into the narrow hollows to treat people and deliver babies through what became known as the Frontier Nursing Service.
Breckinridge died in 1965, but the local hospital is still named for her. So is the annual community festival. Black and white photos at Hyden City Hall commemorate the nurses on horseback, and many residents can trace being helped into the world by the Frontier Nursing Service.
So it didn’t sit well with many people in the county when the organization Breckinridge founded bought property in Versailles in 2017 and began working to move there.
“They turned their back on her legacy, is how people feel,” said Hyden Mayor Carol Graham Joseph. “Everyone here reveres Mary Breckinridge’s legacy.”
Frontier Nursing University, as the organization is now called, said it needed the larger, 67-acre campus in Central Kentucky — the former United Methodist Children’s Home — to serve its growing enrollment.
The Hyden campus had hit its capacity, and traveling to Hyden “has presented many challenges,” FNU said in a new release at the time. The new campus is close to the Lexington airport.
The organization said the new campus would help it continue to fulfill Breckinridge’s vision of educating nurses to help mothers and babies in rural and underserved areas.
Moving to Versailles was a “difficult and emotional decision” for the Frontier board and leaders, the president, Susan E. Stone, said in a statement.
The organization uses a distance-learning approach so has not conducted classes in Leslie County in some time, but hosts orientations and clinical sessions in Hyden, according to a spokeswoman.
FNU has said it plans to move all on-campus student activities to the Versailles facility, with 2020 as the goal.
Frontier has been a key employer in the county, so the loss of jobs and economic activity caused by the changes has hurt, and it will add to that when all student activities shift to Versailles, local officials said.
“It’s going to be a huge blow countywide,” said Joel C. Brashear, an officer at Hyden Citizens Bank.
Despite the changes, many Leslie County residents expected the connection to Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service to remain because of its historic buildings in the county.
Those include the two-story log “Big House” that Breckinridge had built on a steep hillside overlooking the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River at Wendover, a few miles from Hyden, where she lived from the mid-1920s until her death.
A history of the house says there were five inside bathtubs in the county in 1925, and the house had two of them.
Frontier operates a bed and breakfast — lauded for its cooking — and retreat center in the house, which is listed as a national historic landmark.
Another beloved building with ties to Breckinridge is a stone chapel on the Frontier campus on Thousandstick Mountain overlooking Hyden, which showcases a stunning 15th Century stained glass window.
Concern over the future of the buildings blew up in the county in recent days, fanned by minutes from a Frontier Nursing University board meeting in which members discussed moving Breckinridge’s house.
One board member said it “would be great to be able to move the entire Big House to Versailles,” according to the minutes, which also included comments about using the house for a museum and about studying the cost of moving the house or other buildings from Wendover.
One member noted the need to keep the discussions quiet “so as not to alert and upset the local community,” according to the minutes.
For many residents and people with local ties, the potential to lose pieces of Breckinridge’s physical legacy — which spread on Facebook — was insult on top of injury, a further wedge between the county and its history.
The window in the chapel, which would be easier to move than an entire building, was one particular point of concern.
“The public here is furious,” Brashear said.
People wondered if the national historic designation could be a tool to prevent moving the Big House, and there was talk of a petition against moving any property associated with Breckinridge, or maybe a protest during the festival parade.
Joseph said more than 80 people called her about the issue.
“We feel like it’s a part of our heritage,” Joseph said of the house, chapel and other structures. “She (Breckinridge) built them for here. I feel like she wouldn’t want her possessions to go from here.”
Stone, the Frontier Nursing University president, acknowledged in a statement that there was a discussion about the sustainability of the Wendover campus at a recent board meeting.
The minutes indicate concern that the campus is a financial drain at a time when FNU is working to serve more students.
Relocating the Big House was one of several ideas that came up during a brainstorming session, Stone said.
“Upon further exploration, we realized that we cannot envision a plan where we would move Wendover,” Stone said.
“Wendover and Leslie County are important to everyone connected to Frontier Nursing University as we carry the traditions of our founder Mary Breckinridge forward,” she said. “We value our roots in Leslie County.”
Stone said there has been no decision about what to do with the Hyden campus or the buildings at Wendover, but that Frontier officials understand those decisions need to be thoughtful.
“We recognize that change is necessary in order to keep up with the increased demand for quality health care, grow enrollment at FNU and meet the needs of our students,” Stone said. “Preserving and protecting the long-term sustainability of Mary Breckinridge’s legacy, including her home at Wendover, is a goal we share with the Hyden community.”
Joseph said she understood the reasons behind Frontier’s move to Versailles.
However, she and others are determined to hold on to the physical things that stand as a reminder of what Breckinridge created, she said.
“I don’t want them to take our heritage,” she said.
This story was originally published September 27, 2019 at 2:55 PM.
