Minneapolis’ first maternity hospital in 1886 was a savior for unmarried mothers and unwanted babies

Mothers of the early- to mid-19th century had a wide choice of places to give birth — the bedroom, the living room, the spare room, the kitchen. Births, after all, happened at home.

But what if one had no home? Where could the poor or unmarried expectant mothers go? Options were few until a maverick doctor created Minneapolis’ first maternity hospital.

In 1886, social reformist Dr. Martha Ripley opened the city’s first maternity ward called Maternity Hospital in a house in south Minneapolis. Ripley, who led Minnesota’s suffrage association for six years, lobbied for unionizing maids and for women to be on the Minneapolis police force, and ran an adoption center for abandoned babies. An 1893 profile on the pioneering obstetrician said: “There is no busier woman in Minneapolis.”

The rent for the hospital was paid by a fellow named Louis F. Menage, a name that pitches you straight into bygone Minneapolis real estate drama. Menage was a controversial developer, involved in a messy legal battle over south Minneapolis land at the time, and might have seen his contribution to Ripley as good PR.

The Maternity Hospital served many natal-related purposes: Unmarried women could give birth there, as well as expectant mothers who lacked the funds for proper medical care. It also provided adoption services for babies whose mothers declined to take them home or had no home to which to take them.

An 1886 Minneapolis Journal article on the hospital’s opening noted that the services were not offered to women “of a depraved class” or those who would otherwise be relegated to the Bethany Home, a last-resort facility for the dissolute and mentally ill. Among its first clients, according to a Minneapolis Journal 20th-anniversary account of the hospital’s history, were a teacher, a preacher’s daughter and a “very young Scandinavian girl, homeless, friendless and without money.”

The article characterized the patients as “true representatives of the classes that have followed — not bad nor vicious, but unfortunate.”

The need was great enough that the small maternity hospital moved to Minneapolis’ Whittier neighborhood, where it stood for 10 years. Ripley went on to establish her largest facility in 1896 at the corner of Western (now Glenwood) and Penn avenues in north Minneapolis.

The lot belonged to Alexander T. Ankeny, a local businessman and chairman of the Minneapolis Board of Education. His house was converted into the Ripley Hospital, and over the years more buildings would join the five-acre plot. They included the Marshall Stacy Nursery for unwed moms and their babies, the Babies’ Bungalow for sick tots and the Emily Paddock Cottage, named after a long-serving senior nurse at the hospital, for nurses.

In 1906, according to a Minnesota Journal account of the hospital’s last annual report, the hospital served 68 women — 44 unmarried, 24 married. Twenty babies had been adopted. Five had died. All told, over 20 years, the hospital had cared for 3,725 women.

The recitation of statistics didn’t include the number of babies rented out for theater productions, but we know there was at least one. On Feb. 23, 1888, the Minneapolis Journal reported about a sensational event at the Grand theater in Minneapolis: A play opened with a husband carrying an infant, and the audience heard the sound of a real baby onstage. The audience was amazed. Word quickly spread, and people showed up the next night for the real cries of a baby.

As the paper said: “But Tuesday and last night there was no life in the bundle, and the audience each night was disappointed in not being surprised.”

The article went on to explain the reason.

“The baby was procured at the Maternity Hospital and an agreement was made to pay a dollar a night for its use. On Tuesday, Dr. Martha G. Ripley wrote to the [theater manager] informing him that the baby wouldn’t play any further engagements for less than $2 a night. The manager replied that he would not meet the raise; but would take the baby at the wages first agreed upon.”

Neither Ripley nor the manager budged on the matter, and that was the end of that.

It seemed a bit crass to rent out an infant for a theater production, but it wasn’t the last time babies were commercialized for entertainment. In 1905, the Wonderland Amusement Park, a long-gone playground at Lake Street and 31st Avenue S., opened a two-story attraction that showed off the newfangled “infant incubators.” Folks queued to see the new medical miracle where premature infants were kept alive by modern science.

Wonderland closed in 1911, and the site is unrecognizable today except for the incubator attraction, which became an apartment building. It still stands at the corner of 31st Avenue and 31st Street in the city.

Maternity Hospital was renamed the Ripley Memorial Hospital in 1915 and then became the Ripley Hospital for Women in 1955. It closed a year later after facing competition and financial pressures. It was transformed in 2007 from hospital buildings into a low-income housing complex called Ripley Gardens. Two structures from the past still remain today — the original house and a three-story residence. A plaque tells modern-day occupants the philanthropic history of the building. The organization transitioned into a charity aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy, and survives today as the Ripley Memorial Foundation.

When Ripley died in 1912 at the age of 68, her obituary noted “overwork” and the lingering effects of typhoid fever. Her last words are said to be: “Is everything all right at the hospital?”

She had three children of her own, who lived long enough to see Mother’s Day take hold as an American holiday.

The last babies born in the old maternity hospital would be grandparent-aged today, and you wonder if their grandkids know the story of Ripley, and what the Vermont native did for the care and dignity of the women in need.

Ripley would be pleased to know that her name survives, and the hospital building still stands as a testament to her labors.