Akron, Cleveland and County Mayo · 1966 and after
Both hospitals where she ran alcoholic wards have been torn down. Her work goes on: Rosary Hall still treats patients, and an Akron detox unit carries her name.
“Her message in 1939 brought alcoholics to treatment, but today we are challenged to bring her treatment to alcoholics.”
After Sister Ignatia, Rosary Hall was run by Sister Victorine Keller, who had kept Charity’s first alcoholic ward in the 1940s, and then by Father John M., Darrah writes. Later anniversaries fell on October 7, the day the ward was granted. In Akron the St. Thomas ward came to be called Ignatia Hall; Darrah’s 1992 book lists it among her archives but gives no date for the name. Bill W.’s 1950 plaque was still on its wall in 1966, he wrote.
St. Thomas joined Akron City Hospital in Summa Health System in 1989. In 2006 Summa turned the old hospital chapel into the Sister Ignatia Heritage Center and Chapel, a stop for many of the thousands of AA members who come to Akron each June for Founders Day. It closed in 2022, and its windows, altar and keepsakes were divided between a new building and a Catholic high school; Where to find her now has the details. In January 2023 Summa moved its behavioral health services, Ignatia Hall among them, to a new pavilion on its Akron City campus. St. Thomas closed that year, and in 2024 it was torn down.
In Cleveland, St. Vincent Charity stopped admitting inpatients and closed its emergency room in mid-November 2022. Rosary Hall stayed open as an outpatient program, and by late 2024 it had moved into the Sisters of Charity Health System building on the stretch of East 22nd Street that the city had named Sr. Ignatia Way in 2008. The hospital’s main tower, opened in 1965, was torn down in 2025. Rosary Hall now counts more than 100,000 patients since 1952.
More is coming. A Sr. Ignatia Gavin, CSA, Center for Addiction Medicine, with a chapel, a community room and a kitchen, is being built in the same building, and Rosary Hall is to move into it. And a new crisis center has opened in the old medical office building where Rosary Hall had been until 2024; a Rosary Hall unit for withdrawal care there is due to open in January 2027.
It’s June, in Akron. Thousands of AA members are in town for Founders Day, and for years many of them stopped at St. Thomas Hospital, in a little chapel named for Sister Ignatia.
The chapel closed in 2022, and the old hospital is gone now. Summa saved two of its stained-glass windows for a new building across town, where a detox unit still carries her name. Outside it there’s a garden with twelve stone benches, one for each of the Steps.
In Cleveland, Rosary Hall is still open, on a street named Sister Ignatia Way, the same street where it began in 1952.
When she died, Bill W. reckoned she had helped fifteen thousand alcoholics and their families. Rosary Hall, still going, has now seen more than a hundred thousand.
For visitors
Neither hospital where she ran an alcoholic ward is standing. Most of what she left can still be found, in Akron, in Cleveland and in Mayo, by anyone who knows where to look.
From Summa Health, the Sisters of Charity Health System, Rosary Hall, the Akron Beacon Journal, news from Cleveland and County Mayo, and Darrah’s biography. Checked in October 2026; opening dates can change.
The St. Thomas ward, under the name it came to carry, is now a fourteen-bed detox unit on Summa’s Akron City campus. The building where she and Dr. Bob started it was torn down in 2024.
Summa Health Foundation; Darrah, Appendix A.
In the Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion: keepsakes moved from St. Thomas and a film about AA’s history. When Summa closed the chapel in 2022 it said two of its stained-glass windows, To Visit the Sick and To Feed the Hungry, would be restored for this room, with four cases of her things and Dr. Bob’s. Outside, a garden has twelve granite benches, one for each Step.
Summa Health; Akron Beacon Journal, August 2022.
Summa had made the old St. Thomas chapel a heritage center in her name in 2006. When it closed the chapel in 2022, it said the marble altar, the Stations of the Cross, the other windows, the statues and the pews would go to St. Vincent–St. Mary High School.
Akron Beacon Journal, August 2022.
Still open, as an outpatient program, in the Sisters of Charity Health System building on East 22nd Street. A center for addiction medicine in her name is being built on another floor, and a Rosary Hall unit for withdrawal care is due in January 2027 at a new crisis center nearby.
Rosary Hall; Sisters of Charity Health System; The Centers.
Chosen by her superior, Darrah writes, so that it could be reopened if the Church ever moved to make her a saint. Wikipedia puts her in the motherhouse cemetery at Richfield instead.
Darrah, chapter 1; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Unveiled on May 24, 2017, one among the ruins of the Gavin family’s cottage at Shanvally, where Mayo says she was born (Darrah says Ballyhane; Lessons at home has both), and one an hour later in Castlebar. In 2025 Mayo County Council gave her its award for the diaspora, posthumously.
Connaught Telegraph, May 2017; National Museum of Ireland, 2026.
For a closer look
What “first” means, the honors that came after her death, and how her life got written down.
Wikipedia calls St. Thomas the first hospital anywhere to treat alcoholism as a disease, and dates her first patient to 1935, four years early (Terrible indigestion has the date). Summa calls it the country’s first hospital unit for alcoholics. Darrah’s own claim is narrower: the first religious institution to make treating alcoholics a permanent policy. Bill W.’s 1950 plaque is narrower still: the first religious institution to welcome AA.
Hospitals had dried out drunks long before 1939. Towns Hospital in New York had been doing it since the early 1900s, and Dr. William D. Silkworth treated Bill W. there in 1934, as The Little Doctor tells. In Akron, City Hospital had taken Dr. Bob’s drunks since 1935. What St. Thomas added was a religious hospital’s lasting commitment and, in time, a ward of AA’s own; AA’s 1957 history claims only that it was the first religious hospital that regularly took in AA prospects. Darrah says Sister Victorine copied the plan at Charity in the early 1940s, though her own chapter on Cleveland dates that ward to 1945, and that Dr. Silkworth and the nurse Teddy R. took it up in New York after that.
She turned most honors away while she lived (Eternity is now). They kept coming after her death. The Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her in 1991, and Modern Healthcare’s Health Care Hall of Fame in 2008; a sister of her order wrote about it in Health Progress on the day of the ceremony. She is also in the Ohio Addiction Professionals Hall of Fame.
Cleveland gave a stretch of East 22nd Street her name, Sr. Ignatia Way, in 2008. In 2025 her order and the doctors of the former St. Vincent hospital pledged $300,000 to Case Western Reserve’s medical school for a student research fund and a lectureship in her name, with student rotations at Rosary Hall. And in June 2026, for the sixtieth anniversary of her death, Sister Judith Ann Karam of her order and Dr. Theodore Parran of Rosary Hall told her story at the National Museum of Ireland, near Castlebar.
The first try at her biography died with its author. Father Thomas C., the Jesuit chosen to write it, died within months, and much of what he had gathered was lost (A live Sister tells the story). Mary C. Darrah began again in the early 1980s, with the backing of the Sister Mary Ignatia Gavin Foundation, and the book took her nine years. Loyola University Press published it in 1992.
Darrah had grown up close to the story. Her father was on Charity’s medical staff, her mother had trained in its nursing school, and she was five when Rosary Hall opened; Sister Ignatia visited their home. Her book is the source for much of this piece, and where it can be checked against other accounts, these pages show where it agrees and where it doesn’t.