Kerrville VA Hospital

The Kerrville VA Medical Center began as a tuberculosis hospital for veterans of the First World War, in the years when tuberculosis patients were coming to Kerrville for their health. In November 1919 Kerr County citizens raised about $500,000 to build it. Louis and A. C. Schreiner donated 790 acres east of town in April 1920, and construction began. When the money ran out in January 1921, the unfinished project was sold for one dollar to the American Legion's Department of Texas, and State Senator Julius Real won a $1.5 million appropriation to finish it. The 15-building American Legion Memorial Hospital admitted its first patient on July 1, 1923, under the federal Veterans Bureau, which bought it from the state in 1925 for $1,182,000. The settlement that grew up around it was called Legion and had its own post office from 1922; it was absorbed into Kerrville by 1970. The main hospital building was dedicated in 1947, and the American Legion cemetery on the grounds, dedicated in 1933, became Kerrville National Cemetery. The hospital was part of a wider health trade. Florence Butt moved to Kerrville in 1905 for her husband's tuberculosis and opened the grocery that became H-E-B. Across the Guadalupe, a dude ranch became the Mountain Park Sanatorium in 1915 and then Dr. Sam E. Thompson's sanatorium, and in 1937 the state reopened that property as a tuberculosis sanatorium for Black Texans, the forerunner of Kerrville State Hospital. The VA describes the Kerrville campus as the oldest continuously operated veterans medical facility in Texas.