Geisinger Medical Center

At the age of eighty-five Abigail A. Geisinger, widow of an iron industrialist, used her inheritance to found Danville's first hospital. Named George F. Geisinger Memorial Hospital in honor of her husband, the institution was planned by the director, Dr. Harold L. Foss, a graduate of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and a physician at the Mayo Clinic. Originally a neoclassical stone building with a monumental Ionic portico, it has been altered and expanded at least once every decade. In the 1920s, Boston-based Edward Fletcher Stevens, a hospital architect who had worked in New England and Canada, designed several pavilions and a School of Nursing. In 1940, successor firm Stevens, Curtin and Mason designed the Diagnostic Building and William Harold Lee added the Dispensary Building and a new nursing school over the course of the 1940s and 1950s. Several new facilities were subsequently added by Ellerbe and Co., chief architects of the Mayo Clinic, including the Foss Clinic, which Alexander Ewing of Philadelphia enlarged in 1965. Ewing, Cole, and various associates have been the chief architects of Geisinger since the 1960s when the medical center developed its current modern campus. Recently completed is Ewing Cole's curving glass and steel Center for Health Research and Rural Advocacy. Now the largest rural health-care facility in the United States, Geisinger is also the primary employer in the county.