First US Navy Nurses at Mound City
War-wounded soldiers (Union and Confederate) were brought to a building converted to a hospital, along Mound City's riverbank. (state marker).
Many accounts say the first U.S. Navy nurses served at the hospital and aboard the nation's first naval hospital ship, at Mound City* which steamed to and from several major Civil War battles. The nurses included Sisters of the Holy Cross, who worked in midwestern hospitals during the war. Nurses also included five African-American women.
Four of their names--Alice Kennedy, Sarah Kinno, Ellen Campbell and Betsy Young--have been recorded.(1) Some or all of them were midwives. It was thought midwives were better prepared for the sight of blood.
---The US Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery was created by Congress on 31 August 1842. The first hospital ship, a converted side-wheeler Red Rover, was commissioned on Dec. 26, l862. The medical complement included 30 surgeons and male nurses, as well as four nuns. Red Rover sailed the Mississippi River during the Civil War, treating 2,947 patients over a three-year period. She was sold at public auction in 1865. -- from globalsecurity.org
The USS Red Rover, a 625-ton side-wheel river steamer, was built for commercial use in 1859. She served initially as the CSS Red Rover in 1861 and was captured on April, 7 1862 at Island Number Ten (in the Mississippi River) by the USS Mound City. She served as a hospital ship for the U.S. Army's Western Gunboat Flotilla through the summer of 1862, and was re-commissioned as the USS Red Rover of that year. She was used for the rest of the Civil War as a hospital ship for the Mississippi Squadron and sailed with them during their engagements.
The squadron, numbering some 80 vessels, was based at Mound City, the site of large naval shipyards that produced ironclad warships for the war effort. The squadron included the famous Eads ironclads USS Cairo, USS Cincinnati, and the USS Mound City. During the Vicksburg campaign (May 18-July 4, 1863) the Mississippi Squadron coordinated with Admiral Farragut's ships that had sailed upstream from New Orleans and though they took heavy casualties they prevailed and Vicksburg fell. The Navy's web site notes that the Mississippi Squadron drew heavily on African-Americans for its crews. -- yesterdaysisland.com
*(The hospital ship) Red Rover's female medical personnel were the first women in history to serve officially on board a naval vessel. In virtually every account, the Sisters who served on Red Rover are credited as the progenitors of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps and the first U.S. naval nurses. Yet the records reveal that from the close of the Civil War until 1908, when the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps (Female) was created, women were excluded from service in the U.S. Navy.
