Search: Frontier Nursing

Thanks to Bus for spotting this interesting story. Stared in 1925 by Mary Breckinridge, the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) provided healthcare to rural folks in Kentucky. At first, horses and saddlebags helped them gain access to remote areas, but during WWII the group turned to jeeps. As these photos show, over the years FNS used a variety of different jeeps. There is even a 1931 documentary about the group (with additional information here):

In the late 1930s Edsel Ford donated a reconditioned Model A to the Service, which Mary named Henrietta. Several years later Ford replaced Henrietta with Henrietta II, a jeep. At some point the FNS secured another jeep, a WWII jeep Mary named "Jane", named for a benefactor Clara "Jane" Ford".

It looks like the Service might have obtained a CJ-2A, but this picture is not conclusive:

Probably in the early 1950s, FNS obtained one or more CJ-3As:

Later, it obtained CJ-5s and CJ-6s:

In 1952, Mary authored a story about the FNS titled Wide Neighborhoods: A Story of the Frontier Nursing Service.  It's possible the book might yield more specific information about the introduction of jeeps into the FNS. IN the meantime, the University of Kentucky appeared to have more digital images of the FNS and jeeps, but unfortunately I couldn't get the links to open.

The school founded by the FNS continues today as Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing.

Frontier Nursing Service

A different Tim shared this great color photo of a nice CJ-3B that was used by the Frontier Nursing Service.

The Frontier Nursing Service was founded in 1925 by Mary Breckinridge and they were pretty amazing how they served rural Kentucky communities. Horses and eventually Jeeps were used extensively to support their outreach efforts.

The background of the service can be watched here it’s really an amazing story of how people coming together can make a huge impact for so many generations of families. Talk about Horse Power!

https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/mary-breckinridge-and-the-fns-video/kentucky-studies/

Previously on eWillys:

https://www.ewillys.com/?s=Frontier+Nursing

You can view the first group of images here and learn more about their history. he MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History in Little Rock, Ar, only exhibits one jeep (shown below), but they do have a variety of WWII Jeep photos in their archive, many of which include captions.  Here are 9 of them.  The photos are part of the Allison Collection of World War II Photographs, the captions of which come from the ACME wire service.

The caption for the image below is: Yanks Hunt Eggs (CQ) in France
France—Holding a lettered board written in French and meaning “have you any eggs?” two Yanks ride in a Jeep and hope for a positive answer from French girls in the city of Rumegies, France. Driver and sign holder is Pvt. Maury Sanders of Corinth, Miss. The other Yank, Pvt. Albert Frank, Burlington, VA., looks on.  Credit: Army radiotelephoto from ACME.

The Caption for the image below is: On one of the most dramatic journeys recorded in the annals of the war, so far, Lt. Gen. Joseph W. Stillwell, at the head of a band of 114 Americans, Burmese nurses, Chinese, Indians, Britons and Anglo-Indians, covered 140 grueling miles on their retreat from Wuntho, Burma, which began on May 4th, 1942. For days the band struggled through the torturous heat of the dense malaria-infested swamps and jungles of Burma, to reach the banks of the Uyu River, where they were forced to abandon the few Jeeps and trucks they had, to proceed on home-made rafts, down the river to the Chindwin and Thenge to Imphal on the Indian frontier. They arrived at their destination, Dinjan, India with only a few cases of malaria and heat exhaustion. Considering what they had been through, their journey was remarkably successful. Here, in a series of 25 official U.S. Army photos, just arrived from India, the story of the retreat is graphically presented.  New York Bureau
This bridge was repaired by the Chinese on time, and Major General Franklin C. Sibert, starts ahead of the first Jeep in the column.
Credit: (U.S. Army Photo from ACME)