St. Cloud Hospital

St. Cloud Hospital is a hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota, United States. It is a Catholic-affiliated, not-for-profit institution and part of the CentraCare Health System. The hospital has more than 9,000 employees, 400 physicians and 1,200 volunteers. It serves 690,000 people in a 12-county area.HistoryWhat would eventually become St. Cloud Hospital began as a succession of hospitals beginning in the late 1880s.The first such institution was St. Benedict's Hospital, founded in 1886 by a group of Roman Catholic nuns from the Order of St. Benedict at the urging of Dr. A.C. Lamothe Ramsay. The hospital played a major role in aid following the Sauk Rapids Cyclone and was in need of expansion by 1889.In 1889, the sisters accepted a gift of land southeast of the city for a larger hospital, St. Raphael’s, and the new facility opened on May 30, 1890. However, the failure of the city to extend roads and bridges to the area made it virtually inaccessible. The hospital never held more than seven patients at a time. Ten years later, a new hospital was constructed adjacent to the original building in 1900.