Nurse Maude Callen opened her clinic in her home in Pineville in 1923. This building was constructed with $ 27,000 in contributions after an article on Nurse Maude appeared in Life Magazine in 1951. The clinic closed in 1986. Local residents have appealed to the Berkeley County Council for funds to renovate and reopen the clinic.
Editor’s Note: At the request of his readers and in memory of Warner M. Montgomery, Ph. D, we will continue to publish his Adventure Travel stories for the time being.
Nurse Maude put Pineville on the national map. In 1951, Life Magazine published a 12-page photographic profile of Maude Callen by the renowned photojournalist Eugene Smith. The story generated over $27,000 in contributions used to construct a modern clinic in Pineville where Nurse Maude continued to work until her retirement in 1971.
Keith Gourdin remembers, as a teenager, the cars and trucks loaded with gifts and packages that came in the mail for Nurse Maude’s Clinic in Pineville. People coming through would stop at Bobbitt’s General Store and ask, “Where’s Nurse Maude’s Clinic?” or “Where can we deliver this package for Nurse Maude?”
The rural mail carrier, Claude Crawford, put many additional miles on his car making multiple trips from the St. Stephen Post Office to Pineville just to bring in Nurse Maude’s supplies.
The Maude Callen Clinic was erected in 1953 by Bishop T.N. Carruthers, Episcopal Diocese of S.C.; W. Eugene Smith, promoter, New York; W.K. Fishburn, M.D., County Health Director; Maude D. Callen, R.N.; Rev. J.S. Ravenel; Rev. A.M. Mazyck; Rev. A.M. Roberts; Rev.W.M. Warley; Rev. F.H. Grant; Rev. E. D. Addison; and Rev. M. P. Pyatt.
My mother, who was raised in Pineville, used to tell my sister, Mimi, and me how she helped Nurse Maude birth babies at her clinic in Pineville. It did not really register with me until decades later what that meant to my mother who, at the time, was caring for her father as he lay dying of kidney disease.
Maude Callen was born in Quincy, Florida, in 1898. She received her college degree at Florida A&M University and then completed a nursing course at Tuskegee Institute. She moved to Berkeley County, S.C., in 1923 as an Episcopal missionary nurse, one of nine nurse midwives in South Carolina.
Nurse Maude opened a clinic in her home in Pineville and took in anyone who wandered in. This was the time of outward migration of black people from the South. Those left behind suffered from the physical effects brought about by Jim Crow laws and the impending Great Depression.
Later, after her fame emerged, Nurse Maude recalled that there were only two cars in Berkeley County and none of the roads were paved. Many of her patients arrived at her home in oxcarts in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t long before Nurse Maude was tending to contagious diseases as well as obstetrics and pediatrics. She bought a car and travelled over 36,000 miles-a-year within the county serving those too sick to come to her home and tracking down, like a detective, those who had come in contact with tuberculosis or other infectious diseases. She worked 16 hours a day, six days a week. Her salary was $225 a month.
In 1936, Nurse Maude joined the Berkeley County Health Department. Her job included training midwives throughout the county. She taught young black women the proper practices in prenatal care, labor support, baby delivery, and handling of newborns.
By 1950, Nurse Maude Callen had drawn the attention of Eugene Smith (1918-1978), a former war correspondent in the Pacific Theater of World War II. He visited her clinic for many weeks and became so involved with her compassion that he gave blood for a transfusion.
Smith said the photographs he took of Nurse Maude were the “most rewarding of all my work.” He said, Maude Callen was “the most completely fulfilled person I have ever known.”
Keith Gourdin contributed to this story.
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