Fourteen Women and a Purple Cross: A Forgotten Story of Care in Wheeling

On a June Sunday in 1947, Wheeling made room for a celebration of service.

Bands led a procession through downtown. Delegates arrived from across West Virginia and beyond. Churches welcomed visitors, Lincoln High School students supplied music, and the Pythian Building on Chapline Street became a gathering place for people whose organizations helped sustain Black community life.

Amid the speeches, reunions, and ceremonies, fourteen women marked an achievement of their own.

They graduated as Purple Cross Nurses.

Their story survives in a few newspaper columns—brief passages surrounded by the busy life of a city. Yet those passages open a door onto something much larger: a national movement of Black women who made caring for others an organized community responsibility.

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this is precisely the kind of discovery that makes returning to old newspapers so rewarding. Follow a name, a ceremony, or an unfamiliar organization, and another part of Wheeling’s history begins to emerge.

This time, the trail leads to fourteen graduates, a nursing oath, and a purple cross.

When the Elks Came to Town

Wheeling hosted the twenty-fourth annual sessions of the West Virginia Elks Associations of Lodges and Temples from June 8 through June 11, 1947.

The hosts were Panhandle Lodge No. 74 and Deborah Temple No. 125, local organizations within the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, commonly known as the Black Elks.

Established in 1898, the order developed a far-reaching network of lodges and women’s temples. Its activities brought fellowship together with education, charitable work, and public advocacy.

In Wheeling, the convention’s schedule spread across familiar landmarks of Black community life.

Sunday services took place at Wayman A.M.E. Church. Macedonia Baptist Church accommodated convention sessions. The Pythian Temple Theater at 1025 Chapline Street hosted major public events. Later in the gathering, the Blue Triangle YWCA provided a setting for a dinner honoring women’s leadership.

Writing in “Along the Color Line,” Harry H. Jones preserved the details.

His account of the Sunday parade described more than three hundred participants, with music supplied by the Steubenville Elks band and Charleston’s Garnett High School band. Marchers moved from Tenth to Twenty-fourth streets, bringing the convention into public view.

This was a celebration with considerable substance behind it. The gathering included religious observances, memorial exercises, organizational business, and an oratorical competition in which Black students examined citizenship and the Constitution.

And it included a graduation devoted to health.

An Oath on Chapline Street

The June 8 advance notice placed the Purple Cross Nurses’ exercises after the afternoon memorial service at the Pythian Temple Theater.

A week later, Jones reported what had happened.

Fourteen Purple Cross Nurses had graduated. Dr. E. B. Thompson of Williamson, the state Elks medical director, administered the “Purple Cross Oath and Capping.”

Jones explained:

“The graduates received diplomas showing completion of studies in hygiene, home nursing and first aid.”

The program operated under the general direction of Dr. Anna B. Jones of Columbus, Ohio, grand directress of the Purple Cross Nurses’ Department of the Daughter Elks’ Grand Temple. Assisting her was Emma Nunnally of Charleston, identified in the follow-up report as state directress.

Those details give the ceremony its weight.

There was a course of study. There were state and national leaders. There was an oath, a capping, and a diploma recognizing the graduates’ preparation.

The three subjects named in the newspaper were practical ones. Hygiene concerned the preservation of health. Home nursing addressed care where families lived. First aid prepared a person to respond when someone was hurt or suddenly needed assistance.

These were skills that could matter at a bedside, during a crowded gathering, or in the uncertain moments before further help arrived.

The diplomas recognized preparation in those subjects; they do not establish that the graduates received professional nursing licenses. Their achievement nevertheless deserves to be understood on its own terms. These women had undertaken training that equipped them to become more useful to the people around them.

And their community gathered to recognize it.

A Purple Cross Across America

The Wheeling ceremony belonged to a movement already expanding nationally.

In an August 1945 report to the Daughter Elks’ national convention in Philadelphia, Anna B. Jones described Purple Cross Nurses serving in hospitals, homes, and communities. Within the order, their responsibilities included attending the sick at meetings, funerals, initiations, and annual gatherings.

She reported that more than twenty-five units had been organized during the preceding year and urged every temple to have a unit by 1946. She also recounted how four members of a Columbus temple had helped care for two seriously ill fellow Daughters in local hospitals.

Her affectionate description of the women as “Angels of Mercy” conveyed the esteem attached to their work.

Two years later, Jones’s presence in the Wheeling graduation reports connects Chapline Street directly to that national effort. The city was participating in a wider undertaking to organize women, teach practical care, and give that service a recognized place within fraternal life.

Care in the Age of Jim Crow

The year matters.

In 1947, Black Americans had helped win a world war while continuing to confront segregation at home. Black nurses had faced barriers to military service, professional opportunity, and recognition. The struggle to open institutions to their abilities continued after the fighting ended.

The Purple Cross Nurses belonged within that larger landscape of unequal opportunity and determined community action.

Their story adds another dimension to the Foundation’s work on Black health. In our research on Dr. J. Katherine Pronty Davis and National Negro Health Week, we have encountered the importance of medical knowledge, public education, and organized efforts to improve community well-being.

Here, we find another avenue through which health knowledge could travel.

A woman who completed training in home nursing could carry that knowledge into a household. A member prepared in first aid could bring it to a public event. A temple could make helping the sick part of its regular responsibilities.

We can appreciate the possibilities in those skills without inventing particular patients or emergencies for Wheeling’s graduates. The curriculum itself tells us that these women were preparing for situations families and communities understood all too well.

Illness could interrupt a working household. An injury could create immediate uncertainty. Caring for someone at home demanded patience, judgment, and knowledge.

Learning how to help was an act of service with consequences far beyond graduation day.

The Women Who Made the Gathering Possible

The newspaper’s names also reveal women directing organizations, arranging programs, and exercising authority across city and state lines.

Anna B. Jones supplied national leadership. Emma Nunnally connected the program to West Virginia. Emma Keys, then president of the West Virginia Daughter Elks Association, was another prominent presence in the convention.

The advance program identified Keys as the director of the Power Community Choir, scheduled to provide music for the graduation program. Jones’s retrospective also recorded her reelection as state president.

Elsewhere in the convention, the Lincoln High School Glee Club, directed by Ruth E. Banks, contributed to the proceedings.

The gathering brought together forms of leadership that could easily become separated in a modern account: music, education, health, religion, and organizational service. In the newspaper, they appear together because they were part of the same community occasion.

That is a valuable reminder for historical research. A choir director might also be a state organizational leader. A social gathering might support an educational purpose. A women’s temple could become a place where members learned how to care for the sick.

Following those overlapping roles helps us recover the people who made institutions work.

Emma Keys Carries the Story Forward

Fourteen years after the Wheeling graduation, another newspaper clipping returns us to Emma Keys and the Purple Cross Nurses.

On September 17, 1961, the Wheeling News Register reported that Mrs. Emma Keys of Wellsburg had been elected Grand Vice Daughter Ruler, the second-highest office of the Grand Temple, during the organization’s convention in New York.

While attending the convention, she had served as guest speaker for what the newspaper described as one of the largest graduating classes of Purple Cross Nurses. The ceremony took place at the Greater Baptist Church.

The profile presented a woman with a substantial record of service: a state president since 1939, an organist with a Pennsylvania temple, an ordained Methodist minister, and a civic and church worker in the tri-state area.

Her appearance gives this story a welcome continuity.

In 1947, Keys helped shape the West Virginia gathering in Wheeling. In 1961, she stood before another Purple Cross graduating class while holding one of the national organization’s highest offices.

An Upper Ohio Valley woman had a voice in a movement extending well beyond the valley.

What the Pythian Building Held

For readers following the Foundation’s work on Wheeling’s African American Pythian Building, the graduation supplies another reason to care about the place.

An address can seem like a small detail in a newspaper column: 1025 Chapline Street.

But attach the people and activities to it, and the building begins to fill again.

Here were the Elks and Daughter Elks, gathering in a Pythian space. Here were Lincoln students contributing music. Here were visiting leaders, families, and fourteen graduates being recognized for their studies.

The occasion shows different Black institutions sharing a setting and supporting a common public life.

Preserving a building’s history requires these details. Architecture tells us something about the structure; events such as this tell us what people made possible inside it.

For one Sunday afternoon in June 1947, the theater accommodated a ceremony affirming that women’s preparation to care for others deserved public recognition.

That belongs in the building’s story.

A History That Survives in More Than Newsprint

Other surviving records show that the Purple Cross Nurses left a material history, too.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture holds a ceremonial collar received by Laura O. B. Frazier, dated approximately to the 1940s. Made with purple velvet and silk, it bears the title “Grand Organizer / Purple Cross Nurses” and a pendant featuring a purple cross.

The object gives physical form to the organization’s identity: its color, emblem, and recognition of women’s leadership.

A 1969 Purple Cross Nurses souvenir journal also survives in the collections of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library. Its archival description identifies the division as a health department jointly operated by the Elks and Daughter Elks.

Such records offer opportunities to learn more about the program’s development, its local units, and the women who served. They also demonstrate how a subject that initially appears to survive in only three Wheeling clippings can lead into a much larger archive.

Fourteen Names Still to Find

For all their value, the Wheeling reports leave us with a particularly human omission.

They tell us that fourteen nurses graduated. They identify the leaders and explain the studies. They preserve the place and the ceremony.

They do not name the fourteen graduates.

Because the event took place during a state convention, the class may have included women from several communities. Finding their names could connect the ceremony to family photographs, temple records, additional newspaper notices, or memories still held in the Upper Ohio Valley and elsewhere in West Virginia.

That search is now part of the story.

At the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, we often begin with a fragment that someone once considered routine enough to fit into a newspaper column. Over time, that fragment can restore an organization to view, reconnect a person to a community, or give a familiar building another layer of meaning.

The Purple Cross Nurses offer all three possibilities.

For now, we can return to what the newspaper does preserve: fourteen graduates at the Pythian Temple, an oath and capping, and diplomas recognizing their studies in hygiene, home nursing, and first aid.

Their preparation mattered enough for a ceremony.

Their service matters enough for us to remember.

-T

Historical Terminology Note

This article includes historical terms such as “colored” and “Negro” when quoting original sources or identifying organizations as they were known at the time. These terms reflect the language and racial conditions of their era; their inclusion is not an endorsement of their use today.

In our own narrative, we use Black and African American, as appropriate. We preserve historical wording to document the past faithfully while honoring the dignity, humanity, and experiences of the people whose stories we share.

Sources and Notes

• Harry H. Jones, “Along the Color Line,” “West Virginia Elks Associations’ Convention Opens Here Today,” Wheeling News Register, June 8, 1947, p. 44. Newspaper clipping supplied to the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation. Provides the convention dates, local hosts, program, participating institutions, and announced Purple Cross Nurses graduation.

• Harry H. Jones, “Along the Color Line,” Wheeling News Register, June 15, 1947, p. 43. Newspaper clipping supplied to the Foundation. Reports the fourteen graduates, Pythian Temple Theater location, oath and capping, curriculum, and supervising leaders. Read together with the June 8 program, this account places the graduation on Sunday, June 8, 1947.

• “Named to High IBPOE Office,” Wheeling News Register, September 17, 1961, p. 37. Newspaper clipping supplied to the Foundation. Documents Emma Keys’s election as Grand Vice Daughter Ruler, her organizational and community service, and her appearance before a Purple Cross Nurses graduating class.

• Daughters of I.B.P.O.E. of the World, Grand Temple, Proceedings of the Forty-third Annual Convention, Philadelphia, August 26–31, 1945, pp. 149–150, “Report of the Purple Cross Nurses,” submitted by Anna B. Jones, August 30, 1945. Contemporary organizational account used for the national program’s activities and expansion. Digitized proceedings, Internet Archive.

• Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, “History of the IBPOEW.” Organizational history used for the order’s establishment in 1898. Read the history.

• National Park Service, “Places of Mabel Keaton Staupers.” Background on barriers facing Black nurses and the continuing effort to end discrimination in nursing. Read the article.

• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Ceremonial IBPOEW collar received by Laura O. B. Frazier,” ca. 1940s, object 2013.46.17.7ab. Museum catalog documents the collar, its materials, and its Purple Cross Nurses inscription. View the object record.

• Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, Souvenir Journal issued by the Purple Cross Nurses Division, August 1969, collection A2025-005-001. The online finding aid establishes the booklet’s existence and describes the division’s relationship to the Elks and Daughter Elks. The booklet’s full contents were not consulted for this post. View the archival description.