Henrietta Dismukes Hospital and Nurses’ Home stood here, though the hospital burned down in 2016 and only the Nurses’ Home remains. Dr. Henry Dodford Dismukes, born on August 11, 1889, in Troy, Alabama, was the son of Henrietta Dismukes and graduated from Selma University in 1915 before earning his medical degree from Howard University on June 10, 1921, with highest honors and every prize offered during his four years there. He served four years as assistant surgeon at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., then took over Harrison Memorial Hospital in Kimball, West Virginia, after Dr. Roscoe Harrison’s death. Soon afterward, Bluefield Sanitorium asked him to build a larger hospital, which he named for his mother, who had died one month before it opened. Henrietta Dismukes Hospital operated from August 16, 1929, to August 7, 1932, serving African American coal miners and their families in the Kimball-Norfolk area of McDowell County, West Virginia. At the time, it was the largest privately owned African American hospital in the country, equipped with the latest technology and 50 beds, and the neighboring Nurses’ Home housed the nursing staff. Under a contract with Bluefield Sanitarium, Dr. Dismukes was to be paid $3.50 per day for each African American patient he treated, but the sanitarium failed to pay him. On March 30, 1931, he sued Bluefield Sanitarium for breach of contract, demanding $150,000, and the court awarded him $4,070. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, he was the first African American man in the United States to challenge a white corporation in court for breach of contract. After the trial, he closed the hospital on August 7, 1932, and he and his wife, Grace, returned to Washington, D.C., where they lived for the rest of their lives. Mennonite Central Committee, or MCC, has worked to honor Dr. Dismukes’s legacy and draw attention to the injustices he and other African Americans in the region faced, and a local committee worked with Kimball mayor Adam Gianato on a proclamation declaring August 16 as Dr. Dismukes Day.