• Name was corrected to reflect the proper name: National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, Mountain Branch
• Significance: Built in 1901-03, the Hospital was a key structure on the original Beaux-Arts campus for the Mountain Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS). The NHDVS was a federal institution authorized by Congress in 1865 and charged with caring for Civil War veterans disabled by their military service. The NHDVS held a competition for the design of the Mountain Branch to be located in Washington County, Tennessee at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. The location was chosen at the urging of local Congressman Walter P. Brownlow for its healthful climate and proximity to underserved veterans in Tennessee and other southern states. Although founded for Civil War veterans of the Union Army, the NHDVS membership had expanded over the decades to include veterans of the Mexican, Indian, and Spanish American Wars.

The winning design for the Mountain Branch by New York architect Joseph H. Freedlander incorporated the latest ideas of comprehensive design and Neoclassicism as taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Freedlander created a hierarchy of communal buildings, barracks, and service functions arranged along a central avenue with views south to the nearby mountains. The Hospital served as a key bookend to the grand central avenue of his design. Its importance was signified by its ornate exterior including large terra cotta cartouches and a mix of red and white brick on the walls. The Hospital included unusual box eaves with open brackets below; this Arts and Crafts detail unified the more ornate Mountain Home buildings with their plainer counterparts. While the rest of the original hospital has been demolished, the Hospital's Administration Building (Building No. 69) survives and continues to serve as the eastern terminus of the main avenue (now Dogwood Avenue).

The Mountain Branch hospital was a mature example of a pavilion plan hospital, a form favored in the United States since the 1870s. Self-contained ward pavilions were arranged for maximum healthful ventilation and light and linked to an administration building and kitchen/dining hall by covered corridors. Each pavilion floor had a spacious open ward with large windows on three sides and independent ventilation ducts. A hall leading to the connecting corridor was flanked by bathrooms, serving pantry, and dining room. Building No. 69 served as the administration building for the Mountain Branch hospital, housing medical offices, file rooms, a surgical suite, and a series of small contagious wards. Continued use of the Mountain Branch for veterans' health care rendered the pavilion wards obsolete, but Building No. 69's survival provides a case study of hospital design at the turn of the twentieth century.

The importance of the hospitals at the NHDVS Branches had been growing throughout the late nineteenth century as medical care became more sophisticated. The Mountain Branch hospital was built first and planned as a key component in the complex. 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. From 1920-26, the Mountain Branch was redesignated the National Sanatorium, a facility dedicated to the rehabilitation of young veterans of the Great War who suffered from tuberculosis. The continued viability of the facility is largely due to expansion of the VA Medical Center and partnership with the new East Tennessee State University College of Medicine starting in 1978. Throughout its history, the Mountain Home hospital has represented our national dedication to the care of veterans and their changing needs.

• Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N1793
• Survey number: HABS TN-254-X
• Building/structure dates: 1903 Initial Construction