National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers - Battle Mountain Sanitarium, Tuberculosis Hospital, 500 North Fifth Street, Hot Springs, Fall River County, SD

The name of the overall site and some individual buildings were edited after the initial photographic survey was transmitted. Previously the site was incompletely called Battle Mountain Sanitarium, and this building was called Battle Mountain Sanitarium, Hospital. The primary name was changed to National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers - Battle Mountain Sanitarium, Tuberculosis Hospital. A secondary name of Hot Springs Veterans Administration Medical Center, Hospital was added. Finally, the name of VA Black Hills Health Care System - Hot Springs Campus was added to Building No. 12 in the secondary name.
See the overview historical context HABS No. SD-24 for additional information on the Battle Mountain Sanitarium and the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.
Significance: The Veterans Bureau sponsored construction of a new tuberculosis hospital on the Battle Mountain Sanitarium campus in 1925-26. This modern hospital would replace the wood frame tuberculosis ward and eventually supplant the original 1907 Battle Mountain Sanitarium hospital complex as the main medical facility on site. The Sanitarium was built at a time of shifting emphasis from residential campuses to medical care for veterans. The importance of the hospitals at the National Home for Disabled Vounteer Soldiers (NHDVS) branches had been growing throughout the late nineteenth century as medical care became more sophisticated. The needs of World War I veterans with lung diseases such as tuberculosis further pushed the shift to medical care as the most prominent aspect of veterans' services. Numerous additions to the Tuberculosis Hospital, starting in 1937 and continuing the most recent addition in 1997, have turned it into the main medical/surgical facility at the Hot Springs Campus of the VA Black Hills Health Care System.
Survey number: HABS SD-24-J
Building/structure dates: 1925-1926 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1937-1938 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1963 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1997 Subsequent Work
National Register of Historic Places NRIS Number: 11000561