You cannot walk by the bed and breakfast inn at the corner of East Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street without being struck by its quiet, stately presence on the tree-lined street. The Gable House sits in the heart of our oldest residential neighborhood just blocks from Durango’s downtown.
Many homes have a story unique to the structure and its owners over the years. But few are as interesting as the Gable House, which went from two decades as a home to more than four decades as a hospital originally opened by Dr. Benjamin Ochsner – probably one of the most controversial, flamboyant and talented personalities ever to grace the medical community. The Gable House Bed and Breakfast is the latest conversion. Jeffrey and Heather Bryson purchased the home in 1971 and painstakingly refurbished it to its original elegance.
The three-story home was built in 1892 for James and Eliza Schutt, adapted from a 19th-century pattern book by George Barber containing house plans. James Schutt’s mercantile and flour mill had made him a wealthy man since his arrival in Durango in the 1880s, and he was building a home for a wealthy man.
Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act caused a national depression that rocked Durango and stopped the Schutts from finishing the third floor of their home. The depression eventually forced the closure of Schutt Mercantile, and the home was sold to one of his competitors, J.L. Rachofsky, who lived there with his wife until their store, the Famous Mercantile, was destroyed by fire and closed permanently in 1913.
The structure itself is a late Victorian mansion in the Queen Anne style, made primarily of deep red brick kilned in Pueblo. It stands on a solid sandstone foundation. There is a wooden wrap-around porch on the first level with ornate banisters, and the balconies on the second floor are just as ornate. Turrets and bay windows, varied wooden textures, designs in the bricks above the first-floor windows and, of course, the distinctive fish-scaled shingle gable ends add to its singularity.
Colorado historian and author Linda Wommack was impressed enough by the structure’s beauty and historical significance to include the Gable House among the 10 homes described in her book, “Historic Colorado Mansions and Castles.” Yes, our local Gable House is enshrined alongside the splendor of the Molly Brown house in Denver and Miramont castle in Manitou Springs.
Some of the criteria qualifying it for inclusion included: a listing in the National Register of Historic Places, a home that is not closed to the public and meeting the definition of a mansion. Wommack used a mansion definition by the U.S. Real Estate Association of a dwelling of at least 8,000 square feet.
Between its time as a private home and a bed and breakfast, it went through a remarkable transformation that lasted from 1913 until 1959, first as a private, and then a public, hospital.
An unusual man converted this elegant home to a hospital. Dr. Benjamin Ochsner came to Durango from Telluride in 1903, where he played flute with a quartet celebrating everything from the installation of officers for the Knights Templar to the anniversary celebration of the Miriam Chapter of the Eastern Star at the Sheridan Opera House.
Ochsner claimed a long lineage of physicians and surgeons, dating back to the Crusades. When he first came to Durango, he practiced at Mercy Hospital. He butted heads with the Sisters of Mercy and all of the medical staff (there were only six other doctors in town at the time). He opened his own private hospital later that year in a two-story home just a few blocks away, then moved his hospital to another home, this one a larger sandstone edifice, even closer to Mercy. The home on East Fifth Avenue was his third hospital site in only 10 years – but it stuck.
Ochsner oversaw the conversion of the Schutt Mansion to the Ochsner Hospital as he had the other two. He converted the original parlor to his consulting room and office, incorporating part of the existing porch, and transformed most the first-floor living space into two separate hospital wards. The second floor housed patients with the means to pay for a private or semi-private room. The kitchen was in the basement, and he cut through the floors for a dumbwaiter to deliver food to the first and second floors.
The bulk of his energy went to refurbishing the third floor, which had never been completed. He was a surgeon and the open space of the third floor was ideal for designing a surgical suite. Glass in the windows on the north side was replaced with leaded prismatic glass tiles, designed to direct more light and less glare to the interior of the room.
One consequence of a third-floor surgical suite was getting patients to and from the operating room without an elevator. Open drop ether was the anesthesia of choice, and fortunately, there is no record of a fire from this highly flammable liquid – fortunate since there was no fire escape from the third floor of the building at that time.
Patients were carried on a canvas stretcher that could bend with the patient to get around tight corners. In 1957, Dr. Chester Wigton worked at the hospital long after Ochsner’s retirement and remembers it took four people to carry a patient up or down the stairs.
The surgeon for the case was often the fourth stretcher-bearer. To help deal with the tight corners, stair banisters near the landing were cut at least 6 inches shorter so nurses did not have to raise the stretcher to shoulder height to continue around a corner. The fire department was called to assist moving large patients. Open drop ether was still used in surgery during the 1950s, though there was now a metal fire escape for the third floor.
Ochsner is credited with performing Durango’s first goiter operation (in the age before antibiotics) and bringing the first radiology equipment to the community. He attended Rush Medical College, interned at Cook County Hospital in Chicago followed by an additional year of study in Vienna. He was a superb marksman and during his tenure in Vienna won the Austrian National Pistol Shooting Championship. Once settled in Durango, he gave frequent shooting exhibitions, with skills honed at the shooting range below his house. The Durango News reported one such display in 1933:
“… using regular ammunition and a .22 rifle with iron sights, he broke small pieces of coal hurled in the air, made sieves of small tin cans thrown by his youthful assistant …
“He then demonstrated that the speed of his draw had not slackened by hurling a small can into the air, drawing his .38 caliber revolver from its scabbard and puncturing the can before it started its descent.”
He took up photography in the 1920s, was inducted into the Royal Photography Society of London in 1942 and has work in the Smithsonian collection of American photographers. The Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College has about 400 of Ochsner’s photos in its collection.
He mostly retired from medicine in 1936 and sold the hospital to two recent medical school graduates, Drs. Leo Lloyd and Christopher Martin. They ran the hospital for only five years until they were both drafted into the medical corps for World War II.
The hospital changed little during their time at the helm. The beautiful wood floors in the mansion had been covered with linoleum by order of the La Plata County Health Department in 1920, citing the need for easily cleanable surfaces in a hospital. When the two young men left, they sold the hospital to La Plata County for $15,000, the same price they paid Ochsner five years earlier. And the county commissioners found themselves in the hospital business.
Other changes were made to the hospital over the years, but an elevator was not one of them and the fire escape was still made of wood. A shed-roofed kitchen was added to the rear of the house in 1940, and a small, flat-roofed utility room was added that same year. A third story metal fire escape was finally added as well.
But in June 1953, the state health department conducted its first inspection of what was now called Community Hospital. Before this, public hospitals had been exempted from these inspections, which ensured all hospitals met minimum standards. At that time, the emergency room at the hospital doubled as a radiology suite. The survey suggested the hospital be used as a convalescent, or nursing, home which had less restrictive standards.
Although the report did not mandate the hospital be closed, the handwriting was on the wall. Although clearly a solid structure, it would be near impossible to bring it up to increasingly stringent hospital standards. The little hospital would have to find a new location.
When it closed in September 1959, there were 39 nurses, according to nursing superintendent Bernice Cooper. The hospital had 29 beds, with an average census of almost 20 patients. Another Community Hospital was finally built in 1962 – with 30 hospital beds. The original Schutt Mansion, Ochsner Hospital, Community Hospital was on the market again, a little worse for wear.
It was eventually purchased and provided housing for college students for the next several years. Four of those students purchased the distressed mansion in 1971. Jeff and Heather Bryson bought out their partners and set about refurbishing the home, continuing to rent rooms for the next 17 years to another generation of college students.
It was eventually, faithfully, restored to its previous glory and opened as the Gable House Bed and Breakfast Inn in 1988, which Heather still runs. Linda Wommack aptly describes it as Durango’s Victorian Diamond.
Guy Walton is a retired nurse and co-author with Barbara Moorehead of “Mercy Hospital of the San Juans.” Reach him at blue52@frontier.net.
Grave marker for Loisa Bass
After Guy Walton’s story about the 1918 influenza outbreak and its toll on Durango (Herald, Sept. 29), the La Plata County Historical Society organized a fundraising effort for a grave marker for Loisa Bass, an 8-year-old who was one of the first local victims to die in the epidemic.
To donate or for more information about the grave marker, call the Animas Museum at 259-2402.
