FIELD HEALTH SYSTEM
Field Health System – Field Health System
Almost a century ago, the rural Mississippi town of Centreville started to grow into the principal point on the railroad line between Baton Rouge and Vicksburg. The town, and others surrounding it, laid the foundation for a solid community, as schools, churches, and businesses were established in an economy just beginning to prosper. Family physicians like doctors C.E. Catchings, H.L. Lewis, W.I. Marsalis, and William T. Thornhill were making house calls in horse-drawn buggies, as they forged a local health care tradition we take pride in today.
In the early 1920’s, young Dr. Richard Jennings Field returned home to Centreville to practice medicine in an office over the old Centreville Drug Store on Main Street. Within a few years, his brother Dr. Samuel E. Field returned from Florida and joined him in the bustling clinic, while over in Woodville, Dr. Charles Catchings, Jr. came home to care for his late father’s patients. The smell of alcohol and ether drifted from the windows of medical clinics in this area’s townships, unassuming locations next to drugstores and dispensaries with beds where patients recovered from minor surgery or stayed for observation.
This is when the dream of a community hospital became reality. The Field brothers secured a personal loan for $50,000 to build a 35-bed hospital, a larger clinic, and a resident school for nurses. The two-story, stucco structure, called the Field Hospital and Clinic, dedicated 75 years ago, in March of 1928, opened its doors to patients of all the area’s physicians and began its heritage as the cornerstone of this community.
In October 2015, a brand new state of the art facility was built along with a new name. Field Health System continues to be one of the most progressive and well-equipped rural hospitals in the state, continuing the legacy of high-quality medical care first conceived here so many years ago.