Providence Hospitals

Overview

The opening of Providence Hospital in Columbia, SC in 1938 was the result of an extraordinary act of faith by an extraordinary collection of people.

Father Martin C. Murphy of St. Peter’s Church, with little more than a fervent belief that Columbia and South Carolina needed the kind of quality health care synonymous with Catholic hospitals, purchased an 18-acre tract in the heart of the state’s capital city for the new hospital.

Columbia businessman James B. Younginer donated the down payment for the property. Interestingly, he was not Catholic, but he was so impressed with the treatment his wife had received in a Catholic hospital in California, he thought the people of South Carolina deserved the same type of faith-based care.

And perhaps the greatest manifestation of faith was that of the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine, a Catholic order in Ohio that mortgaged its motherhouse in Cleveland to finance the new hospital in Columbia, a city the Sisters had never even seen.

But when the Sisters of Charity founded Providence, they established more than just a new hospital. They also established an extraordinary commitment to the lives of the people of our community.