The History of Healthcare in Dansville

Local chamber-of-commerce institutional history page, fetched directly on 2026-08-04. States the 1858 founding of "Our Home on the Hillside" by the Jackson family of physicians, that the enterprise rivaled the health resorts of Europe and drew notable visitors to Dansville including Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, the June 1882 fire and October 1883 fireproof-brick rebuild as the Jackson Sanatorium, and that the water cure facility continued to thrive for several decades until the Jackson Health Resort had to declare bankruptcy in 1914, a failure the page attributes to advances in the medical field having made the water cure obsolete. Also records the World War I veterans' psychiatric-care use of the building and Bernarr Macfadden's 1921 acquisition establishing the Physical Culture Hotel (a specific year at odds with the Dansville Public Library's 1929 date; this bundle uses the library's more detailed 1929 account and flags the chamber's 1921 figure only as an unresolved secondary discrepancy, not a sourced fact of this case).