Please join us for the dedication of a new Georgia historical marker about Dr. John Henry Jordan (1870-1912).
The dedication is public and will take place on Saturday, May 16, at 11:00 a.m., at the site of Dr. Jordan’s hospital at 59 Pinson Street in Newnan, Georgia. Street parking is available but limited. Additional parking will be available at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, 54 Pinson Street.
The historical marker reads:
Dr. John Henry Jordan (1870-1912)
Born in Troup County, Dr. John Henry Jordan earned his medical degree in 1896 from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Like many late-nineteenth-century southern Black doctors, Jordan returned home and opened a general medical practice. By 1898 Jordan moved to Newnan, becoming a pioneer of African-American medicine in Coweta County. In 1908 Jordan built his home in Chalk Level, a historically African-American residential district. Barred from practicing in or sending his patients to White hospitals, Jordan opened Coweta County’s first known private hospital for African Americans at this site, next door to his two-story Queen Anne-style home. Jordan died in 1912 of injuries from a gasoline explosion and is buried in Eastview Cemetery. Coweta County opened the first public hospital serving Black patients in the 1940s. The county’s hospitals remained segregated until the 1960s.
Erected by the Georgia Historical Society and the Coweta County African American Heritage Museum