Time for us to find a little grace this Thanksgiving

 

In the city of Anoka, on the bluff above the river, right where the Rum flows into the Mississippi, Dr. James Francis Kline sought to build his hospital. The view from the site was beautiful, offering a tranquility that he believed would be beneficial to his patients. Kline already had a very successful and well respected practice, but being a dedicated physician, he wanted to do more for his patients. It was 1902, and the new century promised to be a time of unprecedented advances in technology, science, and medicine. Kline had some definite ideas about the direction those advances should take, and he was willing to lead the way.

The hospital would front on busy, bustling Ferry Street, right near the entrance to the original, wooden Champlin Bridge. (What locals call the “old” bridge wasn’t built until 1929.) Anoka was widely known to be a healthful place to live, due perhaps to its climate and ample water supply. The government was beginning to gather statistics about health and longevity which would later prove that from its earliest settlement in the 1850s until the 1940s Anoka did, in fact, have fewer outbreaks of disease and longer life expectancy than other similar sized communities in the United States. Perhaps that fact was the effect, not the cause, of Kline’s Sanatorium being located there.

  

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