Sept. 5, 1982 – Article from the Chronicle-Tribune
in Marion, Indiana
Nora Caudill Wagoner, until her death this February at 99 years of age, was America’s oldest Red Cross Volunteer on record in the United States. She graduated from the Marion Hospital nursing school in 1905.
Shortly before Mrs. Wagoner’s death, her daughter, Mrs. Elvira Crouse, wrote the Chronicle-Tribune and asked if the city would be interested in hearing the story of this pioneer nurse who got her start in Marion.
She furnished us with photographs her mother, kept over the years and the story of Nora Wagoner – one of the earliest professional nurses.
By Celeste Williams
Nora Caudill was born Dec. 17, 1882, the fifth of 12 children, in Alleghany County on Air Bellows Mountain, North Carolina, an energetic girl with a dream to travel.
She would often visit relatives who lived in Marion, Indiana. And it was on one of these visits that she saw a woman in a starched white apron and hat tend to a patient in the home of a friend. And right then she decided to become a nurse.
“I admired her uniform and her cap,” she recalled, “I thought she was just wonderful.”
At the time of Nora’s birth, a woman named Clara Barton was organizing nurses into the American Red Cross. And nursing was just coming into its own by the time Nora decided she wanted this to be her profession.
Hospitals were a new phenomenon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they were few and far between. So were schools to educate nurses, and so were working women.
But the first Marion Hospital, with a capacity of 20 patients, was opened in 1896, on S. Washington Street, and was owned and operated by Dr. T. C. Kimball.
The hospital opened in this frame house in the late 1800s. The 20-patient hospital’s nurses training program was organized in 1902.
Nora Caudill stood tall for a photographer in 1905 with nine other nurses and Dr. Sam Davis (great-uncle of Dr. Joseph B. Davis, Marion), for a graduation class portrait.
Dr. Sam Davis, seated, center front.
The women, hands folded in their laps and short smiles on their pursed lips, were dressed in the traditional starched uniforms – striped blouses with high, stiff white collars, long white aprons and white hats perched atop long hair pulled back into buns.
Nora finally achieved her goal — what was to come next?
“There were few hospitals anywhere in the nation,” she later recalled, so she remained in Marion for a time as a private duty nurse for wealthy families and professionals, she said.
Nora was about as eager to travel as she was to become a nurse. So she left Marion with her diploma, her medical supplies in a little leather bag, and an urge to travel. She carried with her no worries about what people would say about a young unmarried woman traveling alone.
“I had a desire to see the country,” she said. “So I would stay in one state maybe two or three years then move to another.”
So, for 15 years, Nora rode the trains of the United Slates as what she called a “tramp nurse.” She saw Indiana, Montana, Washington, Idaho, South Dakota, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
“I made a habit or wearing my Red Cross pin and in my travels I was approached many times by people needing help,” she said. “Once in Chicago, a railroad conductor saw my pin and asked if I would get off the train and help in an emergency. I stayed there for a week before continuing my trip.”
Alleghany native and, for a time, the oldest living Red Cross nurse from World War I.
In her travels, Nora had taken several of her patients to a tuberculosis hospital in Catawba, Va. She became interested in respiratory diseases, and decided to remain in Virginia for a time for special training at the institute.
The open-air wards at Catawba were meant to expose patients to as much fresh air as possible.
Building 22, from a post card at https://catawba.dbhds.virginia.gov/
Image from the book, Tuberculosis Hospital and Sanitorium Construction,
by Thomas Spees Carrington, MD. Published in 1910.
In 1918, when medical help was badly needed after the end of the First World War, 36-year-old Nora was asked by both the Army and the Red Cross to go to Europe. She responded to the call or the Red Cross, and sailed to France as a “special tuberculin Red Cross nurse.”
She returned from Europe two years later, herself suffering from influenza. So the “tramp nurse” decided to settle down— in her home state of North Carolina, in the place of her birth on Air Bellows Mountain. She married in 1920, and at the age of 40, bore her only child, a daughter.
But her settling down did not stop her from continuing her dedication to nursing. She continued her work while living in North Carolina as a public health nurse in Alleghany County in the 1930s. She also set up care units in boarding schools.
She raised funds for a much-needed hospital in the county, and helped train nurses aides for the facility. She also delivered an occasional baby when the doctor was late- something she did not like to do, “but a baby don’t wait,” she said.
Until her death. Nora Caudill Wagoner kept the steamer trunk that accompanied her to Europe more than 60 years ago, nearby to remind her of the days of her youthful exuberance. The old woman would occasionally open the case for visitors in the small North Carolina county who were curious about this woman approaching a century old who called herself a “tramp nurse.”
In the trunk were her 1918 Red Cross pins, arm patches she wore while nursing in Europe after the war, and a neatly folded white nurses’ cap.
