Origins of Sanibel Hospital

Editor's note: Beginning next week, Buzz From Around the Bend will be a Saturday feature.

I suspect there are many of you who remember Sanibel Hospital back in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a private nursing home at South Main Street and Randolph Road for many years. When I was a kid, my friends and I trekked from our neighborhood on Hunting Hill Avenue at least once every summer to go see the peacocks there.

In 1943, Josephine M. Fiala purchased the 2-acre site at 955 South Main St. with a vacant house and barn. She converted the house to a private hospital and brought in peacocks, deer, turkeys, and other exotic birds to the property, which included a small pond. Remember, this was back before deer and turkey were common sights in the area!

Josephine Fiala was a former pilot who loved exotic animals. Her hospital on the property later became a nursing home. Back 100 years ago, private hospitals were common, and eventually the larger, community hospitals developed from them.

Fiala also donated an entire Renaissance Revival parlor to the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She somehow was the recipient of the furniture from the old Jedediah Wilcox House on Broad Street in Meriden before it was demolished in 1968.

My mother, Barbara Warner, described Ms. Fiala as "way ahead of her time." She described the hospital as a place people went to recuperate after surgery, for at least some of the time.

Fiala also had a nursing home in East Haddam known as Sanibel Lodge.

Price & Lee's Directory for Middletown, in 1950, listed four hospitals in town: Connecticut State Hospital, Middlesex Hospital, Crescent Street Hospital (later absorbed into Middlesex), and Sanibel Hospital on South Main Street.

Before Fiala bought the property, it was a farmhouse with a large barn, built after 1875, and once occupied by the Rogers family (1930s) and, earlier, the Taylor family (1910s). In 1985 Enza and Albert Cubeta purchased the vacant property and converted the house and outbuildings to professional offices. At least one structure was added in back in 1989.

I'd love to hear some stories about this fascinating property from anyone who remembers it as Sanibel Lodge or hospital or earlier! Ms. Fiala certainly warrants more research, so stayed tuned.

Show us some love! Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.