Nurse Stella King Was Instrumental in Island Health Service
BY FRANK STRAUS

Most visitors to Mackinac Island realize that day-to-day life on an island has many challenges. These challenges only multiply as each night falls, and with the coming of each autumn. After the day-trippers return to the mainland, the Island returns to the hands of those who live here.

Creating a high quality of life for Mackinac Islanders, especially Island workers and people who live here yeararound, is not easy. The Island has little money coming into it during the winter time, and during lengthy periods of each year, surface links between the Island and the mainland are cut off.

During the first half of the last century, Mackinac Island dealt with many of these challenges by ignoring them. It is a little-known fact that, up until 1945, the public infrastructure of the Island was little changed from Victorian times. The Island had no library, no modern post office, no doctor, and no medical center.

Facing these challenges was a trained nurse, Mackinac Island's Stella King. King never married, but by the time she died she had become the honorary grandmother of the entire Island. Working tirelessly, she played a leading role in creating, hiring, or fighting for the construction of all of the assets listed just above.

Stella was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frank King; Frank was one of the last commercial men to fish full-time from Mackinac Island. That was back in 1900. The Kings saw that their daughter got a good education on and off the Island, and eventually she qualified as a registered nurse.

For many decades even prior to this, educated people born on Mackinac Island tended to leave and not come back. Stella was unusual in that she returned and dedicated her professional training, and eventually a lifetime of work, to the uplifting of her home community.

Health care on Mackinac Island had not yet recovered from the disaster of 1895. That was the year that the federal government had closed down Fort Mackinac and withdrew the troops. The transfer of Fort Mackinac and the military reservation to the State of Michigan had made possible the creation of Mackinac Island State Park; but it had also taken away the Island's only licensed physician. For almost 100 years, the Fort's surgeon had been the provider of medical care of last resort to Island civilians; the famous care given by Dr. William Beaumont to fur trader Alexis St. Martin in 1822 was an example of this standard of care.

The Island's year-around population of approximately 500 people - a number that has not changed much in more than two centuries - makes it difficult to support the practice of a full-time physician.

During the first half of the 1900s, the Island had done a

good deal of "muddling through." A series of licensed pharmacists, starting with the Baileys and Bogans and culminating with Jimmy Alford, dispensed medicines, and in an emergency an off-Island physician could telegraph a prescription.

In the early 1920s, Island cottagers, led by Dr. L.L. McArthur, had refitted the Post Hospital, originally built in 1829, with anesthesia equipment so that the building could be used as a simple surgery for operations such as appendectomies. This was an effective strategy for the summer months when at least one fulltime physician would likely be visiting or summering on the Island.

For nursing care, there was Nurse King, and that was about it. Year-around Islanders were understandably concerned about how they would face a health crisis during the winter months. The paved airstrip had not yet been built for medical evacuations (it would be built in 1964-65). King was determined to see a modern medical center, with an X-ray machine and other advanced diagnostic capabilities, built on Mackinac Island. She led the founding of the Medical Center Association in 1953.

No one was better than Stella King at getting Islanders of widely different backgrounds and social groups to work together. She was always convening women's meetings to deal with various challenges. With one of her closest friends, cottager Mrs. Delos "Daisy" Blodgett, she founded the Daisy Day fundraising event. The longtime "Christmas in July" festival also originated with Miss King and her friends. And in 1949, Stella King encouraged her neighbors to hold a parade to celebrate the peak lilac season. The June 1949 Lilac Parade was the starting point of today's nineday Lilac Festival.

Stella King had grown up on an island that lacked a public library; she founded a new Library Board in 1945 and led the effort in 1954 to open the storefront library that operated on Market Street for many years, and which is the ancestor of the current spacious library building on Biddle's Point. She encouraged Island mothers and housewives to share their favorite recipes, collecting them into the Mackinac Island Cook Book, still published to benefit the Medical Center to this day.

King understood the challenges faced by the Island's small businessmen and women. She was one herself, as the longtime owner of the building on Main Street that housed the Haynes studio, and later, Dorothy Benjamin Zack's "Picture Shop." She worked hard to persuade Island businesspeople to make the financial commitment necessary to get her community medical center into operation. The first Mackinac Island Medical Center opened in 1957.

Creation of a fully stocked medical center helped realize Nurse King's dream of fulltime medical care on Mackinac Island with the arrival of Dr. Joseph Solomon, who practiced here through the 1960s. Dr. Solomon, Nurse King, and the first Medical Center provided care to the victims of the Cedarville disaster, after the limestone aggregate carrier suffered a collision and sank in the Straits of Mackinac in May 1965.

Today's Medical Center, opened in 2003, is not the one that Nurse King knew. But the spacious facility is a worthy monument to a great lady of Mackinac Island.