Just as there was a movement in the early 1900s to build a new courthouse, the same issue was applied to the Lassen County Hospital. The two-story, twelve-room facility was built in 1883 for $620. It was located next to the Susan River and far enough away from the town proper should a quarantine be necessary.

In essence over time the hospital devolved into a poor folks home. In the campaign to build a new hospital the Lassen Weekly Mail reported the following conditions of the facility in 1914: “The operating room is on the first floor—at least they call it an operating room. It must make a doctor’s hair stand on end every time he enters it. Septicemia stares a surgeon in the face every time he performs even a minor operation. When your mind thinks of a operating room of a hospital the picture presented to the mind is an airy room with tiled floors, enameled walls and ceiling and every facility for cleanliness, but if you have any such picture in your mind when you visit the operating room of the Lassen County Hospital it will be rudely shattered. The room is small, has a wooden floor and the walls are papered the ceiling an ordinary wooden ceiling. The operating table is an improvised one and of course lacks all conveniences which a surgeon should have in order to do good work. The room is kept clean as possible, but you speak of cleanliness in the operating room of a hospital it does not mean the mere absence of dirt visible to the naked eye. It means that every possibility of germs or any foreign matter that could by any possibility infect the patient are removed. In no possible way could the operating room at the Lassen County Hospital be put in condition that a surgeon would even consider safe.” The following year the voters approved a bond measure for a new courthouse and hospital.

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