Auburn's first 'hospital' still standing
About 30 years ago, a few old homes near Auburn resident Ada Lowe were torn down to make way for expansions to what was then-Auburn General Hospital. Lowe wasn’t having it. She kicked off a campaign to save not only a home, but the city’s first makeshift medical center, according to a 1991 States News Service release.
Her efforts saved the Oscar Blomeen House, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Lowe and her family had lived in the home since 1966. Blomeen built the house for his family in 1913, then moved to Bremerton in 1917 to work in the Navy shipyard.
In his absence, he rented the house to the Stone sisters, nurses who turned the home into the community’s first hospital as the flu epidemics of 1917 and 1919 raged. By some accounts, Drs. Owen Taylor and Martin Lacey worked out of the Blomeen house during this time through about 1920.
There were a number of babies delivered in the bedroom-turned-operating room on the second floor that the house became known as “The Baby Hospital.” Blomeen moved his family back to their Auburn home in the 1920s, and Taylor and Kent opened their own hospital, forerunner of Auburn General, now MultiCare Auburn Medical Center.
Blomeen worked and lived in his home until Lowe persuaded him to sell her the house for $25,000. Blomeen then stayed in the older “Little House” behind the main house until his death in 1968 at age 94.
With her heart set on turning the home into a bed and breakfast, Lowe began renovating the home in earnest in 1975, according to the States News Service. Her son, Dennis Hefner, 42, a baker by trade, has since replaced all the rotted wood floors, re-tiled the kitchen and bathrooms and furnished the entire house with period antiques.