The hallways and rooms of Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley had been decorated with paintings and photographs donated by community members. When the provincial government shut down hospital services in June 2013 and turned the building into a long term care facility, the mysterious figures who pull the levers from hidden corners of Health PEI deemed that anything in the building that wasn’t generic had to be removed.

You probably think I’m being dramatic, but I’m not. Down came the paintings that showed rustic local barns and familiar vistas, only to be replaced by made-in-China blandness. The reasoning? It was some vague idea that the facility was the residents’ home and…well, honestly, I never understood it. The place ended up looking like a forgotten corner of an airport lounge.

I documented all the original artwork in the hospital before it was removed, and they are in this Flickr album.

Most of the hospital rooms had been sponsored by groups or families, and all the plaques by the doors acknowledging these contributions had to come down. Photos of past staff, items donated to thank staff, all dismantled. The place had to look like everywhere and nowhere. You can guess I wasn’t a big fan of this move to strip away the long community history of this building.

A new building was built a few years later and now the old hospital building that has stood on a Tyne Valley hill since 1951 will be demolished. What was left in the old building has to be removed.

I received a call to see if our SMH Foundation wanted some memorial plaques. When someone died, and donations were made to the Foundation in their memory, a small plaque would be put up in a beautiful display case that was very visible in a hospital hallway. We had so many donations over the years that we had to build another case to house them all. Of course, as had happened with the artwork, when hospital services were discontinued, the cases had to be moved to an unused ambulance bay, and with them the memory of a community that had cared enough to support the hospital.

So, my mother and I went to pick up the box of plaques at the new long term care facility, which is a beautiful building appropriately devoid of much local character. I picked up the little box of plaques and carried it back to my car. It felt like a funeral and I was carrying the ashes of all that we had worked so hard to maintain.

I put the box on a table when I got home, but didn’t feel up to going through the plaques. The next day, I decided to have a look, and near the top was the plaque with my father’s name from when he died at Stewart Memorial in 2008 after having resided there for a couple of years. I flipped through a couple more names and started to cry. I knew them all, related to many.

The loss of our hospital still stings, and I think it always will. Soon the building will be gone, and younger people will never really know what we had and what we lost. They can knock the place down, but I will never stop talking about it, the remarkable achievement of building and maintaining a small rural hospital for over six decades.