HISTORY
Gastonia native unearths forgotten N.C. Black medical history
Matthew Memrick
Special to The Gazette
Aug. 9, 2026, 5:08 a.m. ET
- A project started by Kim Ramseur documents North Carolina’s often-overlooked Black medical history.
- The project highlights how Black communities created their own healthcare systems when excluded from mainstream care.
- Gastonia’s history includes a hospital for Black patients and a commercial hub known as “The Block.”
- Historians face challenges in this work due to a lack of surviving records and physical objects.
Kim Ramseur grew up around the Erwin Center in Gastonia without ever learning that the facility was named for the city’s first Black doctor. She remembers going with her grandparents to a pharmacy downtown run by Dr. N.A. Smith without realizing at the time the obstacles he’d had to overcome to open it
That gap — between the history sitting in plain sight and what most residents actually know — is what drives the project the Gastonia native, now a Raleigh-based health policy professional, launched in February
What started as a Black History Month exercise has become a daily archive of North Carolina’s Black medical history, and it keeps circling back to her hometown
“North Carolina is so rich with Black medical history, and I can’t help but nerd out learning about it,” Ramseur wrote in her first post on Threads. “Y’all bear with me while I go all the way down this rabbit hole.”
A Gastonia legacy
Ramseur’s connection to Gastonia runs deep. Her grandfather, Donald Ramseur, was the city’s first Black attorney and judge. Her mother worked as a medical librarian. Her uncle died at 8 years old from hemophilia, a rare bleeding disorder — a loss that has stayed with Ramseur as she researched what segregated healthcare looked like for a child like him
“I wanted to highlight many of the individuals that don’t always get acknowledged, because we don’t go past that surface level,” Ramseur said. “Unfortunately, when we focus on one month, the research stops, the conversation stops.”
That’s the same pattern local historians have run into documenting Gastonia’s own Black medical history
Alicyn Wiedrich, curator at the Gaston County Museum, spent years piecing together the county’s past for the museum’s exhibit “The Many Unheard Voices,” covering the African American experience in Gaston County from the 1870s through the 1970s — work that fills in the Gastonia chapter of the same history Ramseur has been documenting statewide
Building their own hospital
Dr. Herbert Erwin opened Gastonia’s first hospital for Black patients in 1920 with an unlikely combination of backers. Wiedrich said the effort likely drew on fundraising from both the Black community and white physicians — a fact she’s careful not to oversimplify
“There’s not only community collaboration happening there, but also a sense of ‘separate but equal,’ which was a very popular idea in the 1920s,” Wiedrich said. “I like people to make their own decisions about why that happened.”
The hospital quickly outgrew its space
“The need for a hospital was so great — they saw patients from beyond just Gaston County, because it was one of the few colored hospitals in the area and in the region,” Wiedrich said
A larger facility replaced it, and today the Rosewood Rest Home stands directly across the street from the original site
A third site, the former Negro Unit at the North Carolina Orthopedic Hospital — now home to Partners Health Management on New Hope Road — also served Black patients, though Wiedrich said it fell outside the scope of her research and its history remains largely undocumented
Midwives and Union Square
Decades earlier, midwife “Aunt Charlotte” McClee was already serving Gaston County families, Black and White alike. Wiedrich believes McClee learned midwifery while enslaved and continued the work for most of her life after settling in the area in the late 1860s. Gastonia has recently recognized her work, renaming a street and a garden after her
“Even though medical services were segregated for a very long time, the African American community found a way to get the treatment that they needed — and a lot of times that came from within their community,” Wiedrich said
Gastonia’s Black professional class also built its own commercial hub. Doctors and dentists — including Dr. Thomas Williston, a physician, and Dr. Cleveland Floyd, a dentist — kept offices on what was formally listed in the Green Book as Union Square, the county’s only entry in the famed travel guide. The area sits in the shadow of the Gaston County Courthouse
“It was just listed as Union Square because it had everything — restaurants, laundromats, a taxi cab service, doctor’s offices, you name it, they had it,” Wiedrich said
She said locals also called it The Block, or Gastonia’s Black Wall Street
Filling the historical gaps
Ramseur’s research method leans heavily on digitized newspaper archives — obituaries especially, which often include a provider’s education and background — along within North Carolina.”
“If you do a basic Google search, this doesn’t all come up,” Ramseur said
An early influence was her research into Leonard Medical School, a top-ranking institution on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh that trained Black physicians before it closed in 1918 — a closure Ramseur sees as directly tied to today’s shortages in the Black healthcare workforce
“People often think about segregation only in terms of what was denied,” Ramseur said. “This history also shows what Black communities created despite those barriers. They established hospitals, nursing schools, medical training programs, pharmacies, insurance companies, professional associations and systems of care when they were excluded from mainstream healthcare.”
Wiedrich has run into the same wall Ramseur is trying to work around: not much survives. Despite years of digging, she’s found few objects or staff records from Gaston County’s Black hospitals — mostly patient accounts, passed down as oral history. The museum does have Dr. Erwin’s medical bag
“It would be great if we had some objects from the colored hospitals in our collection, but as far as I know, I don’t know of anything that exists anymore,” Wiedrich said. “A lot of it is oral history and conjecture, so I can’t tell for sure what all is real and what all needs to be corroborated.”
That’s part of why Ramseur wants her project to outlast her Threads feed. She’s aiming for 365 straight days of posts and is already thinking about where the archive lives next. A book? She hopes it could be a collaborative event with others
“My goal moving forward is finding a space to permanently house this information,” Ramseur said. “I’m teetering around the idea of how to share this information that’s easily accessible for anybody who wants to use it — as a tool for themselves personally or even teaching.”
A statewide mission
The mission Ramseur has taken on isn’t hers alone. Dr. Edwin Burkett, president-elect of the Old North State Medical Society — founded in 1887 by and for Black physicians, dentists and pharmacists excluded from other medical societies — said work like Ramseur’s carries forward a legacy his own organization was built to protect
Burkett, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and board-certified family physician with more than 35 years of medical experience, also serves as president of the L.A. Scruggs Medical Society, the Raleigh-based chapter of ONSMS. He works as medical director at Alliance Medical Ministry in Raleigh, where he provides primary care to uninsured adults across Wake County
“What she’s doing is fantastic and needs to be done,” Burkett said of Ramseur. “The key thing about the work of Black health professionals is critical to North Carolina health — not just in the past, but also now.”
For Burkett, the point isn’t just historical recognition. It’s a reminder of what medicine is supposed to be at its core
“There have always been heroes and caregivers who did not distinguish these things — even where inside the tracks you grew up on, where you come from, what kind of money you have,” Burkett said. “Those are the ones we need to celebrate, we need to advocate for.”
Ramseur put it in statewide terms, but it’s a sentence that could just as easily be about her hometown: “North Carolina’s healthcare history cannot be fully understood without understanding the contributions of Black physicians, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, herbalists, midwives, hospitals, educators and communities. Their stories aren’t separate from North Carolina’s history; they’re essential to it.”
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