Bed-and-breakfast · Wendover (near Hyden), Kentucky · Built 1925–1926
Wendover (the Big House)
Listed on the National Register as Wendover
The saddle-notched log house Mary Breckinridge built in 1925 above the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River as headquarters of the Frontier Nursing Service, the first organized nurse-midwifery program in the United States.
History
Mary Breckinridge, born in 1881 into a prominent Kentucky family, trained as a nurse in New York and, after losing both her children in infancy, worked in France after the First World War. There and in Britain she saw nurse-midwives at work, and in Scotland she studied a midwife-run service for a poor, remote district. Certified as a midwife in England, she surveyed the lay midwives of eastern Kentucky in 1923 and chose Leslie County, she wrote, precisely because it was so hard to reach: if the work could be done there, it could be done anywhere. In the summer of 1925 she began this house, with local masons laying the stone chimneys; her father dedicated it at Christmas to her two children, and it was habitable by spring 1926.
Wendover was the headquarters of what became the Frontier Nursing Service, and for its first three years it was also a cottage hospital, often overflowing with patients; overnight guests slept on a sofa in the dogtrot. Nurse-midwives, many of them British, rode horseback to patients across about 700 square miles from Hyden Hospital, opened in 1928, and six outpost centers. When the Second World War called eleven British nurses home, the service opened the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery on November 1, 1939, the first such school in the country. Breckinridge ran the service from Wendover until her death in 1965. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991 and later became a bed-and-breakfast and retreat run by Frontier Nursing University.
“Between 1925 and 1975 they delivered 17,053 babies with only 11 maternal deaths.”
Architecture
The Big House is a large two-and-a-half-story building of full-round, saddle-notched logs, with the chinking set back to keep a natural look, under gabled roofs. It began as a traditional dogtrot, two log wings joined by an open breezeway; Breckinridge later glazed the ends, and the passage, its walls still rough log, became the dining room. Casement windows are cut straight into the logs, wider in the downstairs public rooms and narrower above. Two great rough stone chimneys with terracotta pots straddle the ridge, and every major room has a stone fireplace. The 26-foot living room's chimney carries a bronze plaque recording the 1925 dedication.
What to look for
- Saddle-notched round-log walls with recessed chinking
- Twin stone chimneys with terracotta pots on the ridge
- Glazed former dogtrot, now the dining room
- Dedication plaque on the living-room chimney
- Log barn once used to stable the nurses' horses
Setting
Wendover sits on a wooded, south-facing hillside overlooking the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River in mountainous Leslie County, about four miles from the small town of Hyden. A county road follows the river below, and a gravel drive climbs to the house past giant beeches. A log barn, once the stable for the nurses' horses, and frame dormitories stand nearby.
Timeline
- 1923Mary Breckinridge surveys midwives in eastern Kentucky
- 1925Construction of Wendover begins; dedicated at Christmas
- 1926House habitable; serves as headquarters and cottage hospital
- 1928Hyden Hospital opens
- 1939Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery opens
- 1965Breckinridge dies
- 1991Designated a National Historic Landmark
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia places Wendover four miles south of Hyden; the nomination says Hyden lies about four miles south of Wendover.
- Wikipedia lists Mary Breckinridge as architect; the nomination says the builder is unknown and names only a contractor from Hazard.
