This Week in Texas Methodist History January 28

Northwest Texas Conference Convenes in Special Session to Accept Hospital

January 29, 1954

Sometimes Annual Conference business cannot wait for the next regularly scheduled session, and the Discipline allows for called sessions of Methodist conferences.   Under those Disciplinary provisions, the Northwest Texas Conference met in Lubbock on January 29, 1954.  The business of the conference as to consider a proposal to accept the Lubbock Memorial Hospital. 

Drs. J. T. Krueger, M. C. Overton, and J. T. Hutchinson were the principal owners of the hospital.  They proposed deeding it to the conference.  The property included the hospital building, a medical building, and two nurse’s homes in Lubbock.   The proposal also included all furniture and fixtures.  The estimated value was about $4,500,000.    The Conference would assume a debt of $1,359,746.21.  

The Annual Conference voted to accept the proposal and within a few years expanded the hospital system by adding a five story addition to the north wing, A nursing school, nurse’s home, and radiation center which was named the Furr Radiation Center in honor of the Furr Foundaiton. 

Lubbock Methodist Hospital traced its origins to a 25 bed sanitarium founded in 1918.  In 1941 it became Lubbock General Hospital and in 1945, Lubbock Memorial Hospital.  In 1998 it merged with St. Mary’s of the Plains, another venerable Lubbock hospital.

Today it is part of the Covenant Health, part of St. Joseph Health.  It provides state of the art medical services not only in Lubbock, but also in Levelland and Plainview.   It serves a vast geographic area of West Texas and New Mexico with a variety of medical specialties and wellness programs.