Qualla: The Hospital That Became a County

The Hospital That Became a County: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first patient checked in on February 17, 1944. By August 30, 1945 - fifteen days after Japan's surrender - 2,310 wounded and ill soldiers filled the wards, the highest count the hospital would ever reach. Four months later, it was closed. DeWitt General Hospital existed for less than two years as a military facility, a burst of construction and purpose that consumed 284 acres of former farmland three miles north of Auburn, California. Eighty single-story brick buildings spread across orchards that had been fruit trees just months before. The speed of it was staggering, and so was the question that followed: what do you do with a small city built for a war that is over?

The Hospital That Became a County: Farmland to Field Hospital

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The War Department approved construction on March 25, 1943, and the facility was receiving patients less than a year later. The site chosen was agricultural land in the Sierra foothills - fruit orchards and farms that were quickly cleared for eighty one-story buildings of brick a...

The Hospital That Became a County: Prisoners on the Fairgrounds

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Adjacent to the hospital, a place called Camp Flint took on its own wartime role. The camp had been built in 1938 as a Great Depression labor camp - a public works project where unemployed men lived in wood and canvas huts while working on federal and state construction. When Pea...

The Hospital That Became a County: The Second Hospital

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Army closed DeWitt General Hospital on December 31, 1945. Efforts to convert it into a Veterans Administration hospital were rejected. Instead, on March 31, 1946, the War Assets Administration sold the facility to the State of California with conditions: it was to be used as ...

The Hospital That Became a County: What the Buildings Became

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On April 1, 1972, the property transferred to Placer County. The eighty brick buildings that had housed soldiers, then prisoners, then psychiatric patients began their latest incarnation as government offices. Today the site contains the Placer County Jail, the Juvenile Detention...