Hey Greenville. Grace here. 👋 I love writing about history + luckily our city is full of it. While hunting for a new story to tell, I stumbled upon this picture of a nun on a motorcycle.

My first thought, of course, was “this is the coolest picture I’ve ever seen.” I thought, “I have to dive into the history behind this photo.”

I found this image in a Greenville Journal article about the history of Bon Secours St. Francis hospital and I knew I needed to know more about the lady in the picture. Did you know that at one time St. Francis hospital was run by nuns, the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis?

Let’s back up a bit. In the early 1900s, the Salvation Army + Greenville’s textile executives built Emma Moss Booth Hospital for the poor residents living in the mill village, but when the Great Depression hit, the hospital became a victim to it. The Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis, an international religious congregation founded in Germany who work in many different parts of the world, were asked to come get the hospital back up + running.

St. Francis made some strides in Greenville healthcare over the years. They were the first hospital with an ambulance, the newer Dunbar St. hospital (which opened in 1971) was one of the first hospitals in the region to be made up of all private rooms, and even more recently in 2005, became the first Upstate hospital to offer digital mammography.

Eventually the numbers for the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis were decreasing – you could say there were…nun left – and in 2000, they gave the sponsorship over to Bon Secours Health System (rebranded to Bon Secours Mercy Health in 2018 when it merged with Mercy Health). Do you know where the name Bon Secours comes from? The Sisters of Bon Secours, a Catholic congregation of women who came to the United States from Paris.

At the end of the day, though, between all of the Sisters and changes in name and the years that have gone by, the hospital’s mission hasn’t changed much: to help people in the community.