The family home of one of California's earliest successful immigrant-entrepreneurs, and later part of the county's first and only hospital, has stood more than 120 years on East South Street.
The Goodspeed history book called the Henry C. Finke Home "one of the handsomest residences in California." Dr. L.L. Latham added his hospital on to the home in 1926.
Henry Charles Finke was born in 1814 in Prussia to a farming family. As a teenager, he was trained as a tailor in Holland. Then, he traveled to America with his widowed mother and siblings in 1840, arriving in Cleveland, Ohio.
Aboard the ship seven weeks from Bremen, he met Sophia Meyer, whom he married a year later. After a smallpox epidemic, the family moved to Moniteau County in 1850. Henry worked a year as a tailor before going into the mercantile business. A 1938 letter written by Edna Baker said Finke's store "carried everything from a paper of needles to a thrashing machine."
He built the first brick commercial building in California in 1857.
During the Civil War, he served as city treasurer, during which time he converted the holdings of the county from $8.46 when he took over to $10,000 when he left office, Baker's letter said.
Baker went on to say that during the war, soldiers destroyed $20,000 worth of the family property. And then, the soldier took Finke out of town with the intention of hanging him, because he would not tell them where the rest of his money was hidden, Baker wrote.
"He was released by the pleading of his little daughter Matilda Frances, who had followed him," her letter said.
After the war, Finke bought up extensive timber land, employed 150 men to cut it down and sold it to the railroad for ties, Baker said.
Finke built and operated the state's first paper mill, the Moreau Paper Mill, though not financially successful, in 1867.
The Finke home on East South Street was built about 1880. The local German Evangelical Church was organized in its parlor and Finke was the first president of the church council. He also served on the building committee for the church building in 1894-95.
The Finke patriarch also was one of the first school board members and helped put through the building of the first California public school. And he was elected to the city council four times over three decades.
The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Finke Opera House described him as "one of the most energetic of California's early businessmen, being actively engaged in business, government and building."
Henry Finke lived in the Finke Home Place until he died in 1895. And Sophia continued to live there until her death in 1915. The property was sold in 1918 to William Heist, who sold it to Dr. Logan Lancaster Latham in 1926.
The Latham Sanitarium was constructed in an L-shape from the back of the home. The home facade, originally clapboard, was covered with the same brick as the new, 27,000-square-feet facility.
Local architect O.E. Sprouce was the project general contractor and Virgil Inman, who built many schools and churches in the region, did the masonry work, according to a 2010-historic survey by Patrick Steele.
Steele called it "eclectic architecture."
From Latham's perspective, the hospital was "equipped to take better care of our own patients and able to do our own work better," he wrote in the Jan. 21, 1926, Democrat Special Booster Edition.
The Lathams had operated two generations of medical practice in the town of Bitsville, later renamed for the family. After his uncle H.W., with whom he had practiced there, died, he decided it was time to expand his services.
"I never yet met one who has impressed me as having any more general all around ability and the knack of knowing how to take care of sick people," Latham said of his uncle.
The small Latham town was set away from the railroad and not yet equipped with electricity and water works.
So, he chose to build the county's first hospital with all the modern equipment in California. He accepted no offers from the city to help his private enterprise. Yet, he opened the facility to all medical practitioners in the county.
His brother Robert H. became the facility's general business manager and pharmacist. The hospital opened with two nurses, an x-ray technician and a dietitian.
It had 33 patient rooms. The entire basement served as a modern laundry room complete with its own hot water plant. There were two 40-square-feet steam baths, divided for private patient use. The reception room was 20 by 40 feet and the dining room could serve 40 at a time. And the operating room was 16 by 28.
The Latham brothers' mother, Ellen, had an eight-room suite on the second floor. Robert and his wife had rooms on the first floor and Dr. Latham and family lived in the old Finke House.
The first patient was W.E. Wickam of Tuscumbia. And the first, and most frequent, procedures were appendectomies and tonsil removal.
Latham did not take contagious or infectious diseases and the hospital became a regular site for local births, the first being Raymond Glenn Morrow June 29, 1926.
Within a year, the Latham Sanitarium had gained the reputation: "great record for relieving human suffering is outstanding asset," according to the June 1, 1927, Jefferson City Post Tribune.
The Sedalia Democrat wrote in November 1927 the hospital has been filled since opening and that patients have traveled from across Central America to receive treatment.
The first Chamber of Commerce Band concert series was held on the west lawn in June 1927.
In 1939, Dr. J. DeVoine Guyot moved his cardiology practice to the Latham Sanitarium and the Alex Van Ravensway Clinic in Boonville.
Dr. L.L. Latham died of a heart attack in 1951. He was born in 1882 and his father, Peter, died two years later. He married Effie Barton in 1915 and they had one daughter, Frances.
His brother, Robert, continued to serve as the business manager and pharmacist. Robert married Nora Johns in 1911 and she worked at the hospital in charge of housekeeping. Robert Latham served 20 years on the California town board, including a term as mayor.
At his death in 1958, still living in his hospital apartment, Robert Latham was president of both the Moniteau National Bank and the Bank of Latham.
Robert's son, Kenyon, followed the uncle-nephew tradition. Kenyon joined his uncle L.L. Latham at the hospital in 1941. At his uncle's death, he took over as business manager and resident physician until 1970, when the Latham Hospital closed in May.
"There were so many requirements that we just couldn't meet them; so we gradually phased it out," said Dr. Kenyon Latham in the Feb. 27, 1972, Sunday News and Tribune.
The paper reported a rural doctor shortage with Dr. Kenyon Latham saying: "We haven't had a doctor move into California since 1952 and three of us are going to retire in about 5 years."
"He is the last in a unique uncle-nephew line of medical men who have served central Missouri towns since 1873," the News and Tribune reported.
Dr. Kenyon Latham graduated from California High School in 1931 and Washington University Medical School, St. Louis, in 1939. Neither of his sons followed in his footsteps.
The pioneer medical family began with Henry W. Latham, born in 1852 in High Point, who read medicine with Dr. Dunlap in High Point and graduated St. Louis Medical School in 1873. H.W. Latham, who died in 1918, was known to keep multiple teams of horses ready and would perform surgery at his small Latham office or using a door taken off its hinges at the patient's home.
Dr. Kenyon Latham continued to operate an office out of the Latham Hospital until his retirement in 1977.
"Thus ending over a century of medical service in his family," the News and Tribune reported.