Alice Mabel Bacon (26 February 1858–1 May 1918), educator and founder of the Hampton Training School for Nurses (later Sentara CarePlex Hospital), commonly known as Dixie Hospital in its early years, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the youngest of two sons and three daughters of Leonard Bacon and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry Bacon. Her remarkable family included nine older half brothers and half sisters. Her father was a well-known Congregational minister who served as pastor of the Center Church in New Haven for more than forty years and subsequently became a professor in the Yale Divinity School. Her aunt Delia Salter Bacon originated the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Her sister-in-law Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey Bacon was a noted Civil War nurse, and her half sister Rebecca Bacon was an assistant principal at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute during its early years.

Alice Bacon attended private schools in New Haven until age twelve. During a prolonged illness of her mother, she went to Virginia to live for two years with Rebecca Bacon in Hampton. While there she taught arithmetic and spelling to the younger pupils at Hampton Institute and attended classes with the senior students. She decided to emulate her sister and become a teacher of African American children, but in 1872 her father took in twelve-year-old Sutematsu Yamakawa (whose given name was Anglicized to Stematz), one of several girls the Japanese government had sent to the United States to be educated. Bacon returned to New England, and the two girls lived together as sisters for ten years and became fast friends. Bacon also got to know another Japanese girl, Umé Tsuda. Yamakawa graduated from Vassar College in 1882 and then studied nursing at the Connecticut Training School. Bacon, meanwhile, continued studying at home and in 1880 and 1881 passed college-level examinations for women administered by Harvard University, including tests in philosophy and political economy.

In 1882 Bacon went to Colorado and taught there for one year before returning to Hampton in 1883 to teach for five years in the elementary practice school for student teachers. Her courses included political economy, civics, and geography, and she also acted as librarian. In 1888 she accepted an invitation to teach at the Peeresses' School in Tokyo, a new school for girls of the Japanese nobility. Both Tsuda and Yamakawa, who had married the country's minister of war, recommended her for the position and welcomed her to Japan. Bacon lived with Tsuda and taught for one year. She reported on her experiences in Japan in a column called "Silhouettes" that she contributed to Hampton's journal, the Southern Workman. Two years after she returned to the United States, Bacon published Japanese Girls and Women (1891), which described the changes in society and the roles of women since the Japanese feudal system had begun to collapse twenty years earlier. Her second book, A Japanese Interior (1893), was an edition of the letters she had written to her family while living with Tsuda in Tokyo.

In the autumn of 1889 Bacon resumed teaching at Hampton, and the following year she helped establish a small hospital that opened in May 1891. With the support of the institute's principal and with the help of physicians, civic leaders, and ministers, she conducted a campaign to create the hospital and begin a training program for nurses. The Hampton Training School for Nurses, incorporated on 4 March 1892, was commonly called Dixie Hospital after the horse that Bacon used to transport ill patients to the facility. The hospital slowly grew to include a maternity area and a residence for student nurses. She served as secretary of the board from the founding of the hospital through 1897. Bacon was proud that the administration permitted no racial distinctions in admitting patients to the hospital. Later, when contributors demanded racially segregated hospital facilities, she helped draft regulations under which such donors were required to make annual contributions to support separate facilities.

Bacon continued to write "Silhouettes" for the Southern Workman to garner public support for the institute and the hospital. Some of the vivid word pictures she drew used dialect to emphasize degrees of ignorance, poverty, and worthiness of the people she sought to help. She also prepared a short report for the John F. Slater Fund in 1896 describing the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895, which was published as The Negro and the Atlantic Exposition in number seven of the fund's Occasional Papers.

Bacon went back to Japan in the spring of 1900 and remained through April 1902 to teach at the Tokyo Women's Normal School (later Ochanomizu University) and at Joshi Eigaku Juku (Girls' English Institute), founded by Tsuda, who changed her first name to Umeko, and later called Tsuda Juku Daigaku (Tsuda College). The institute was the first nonmission school intended solely for the advanced education of women in Japan. The students were high school graduates who studied to become teachers of English or prepared to continue their higher educations in the English language. Bacon served as assistant to the founder, helped to raise funds, conducted worship services, led discussions on current topics, and taught a heavy load without accepting any payment. The social changes she observed since her previous visit to Japan became the basis of a new chapter in the 1902 revised edition of her Japanese Girls and Women. Bacon also published a collection of Japanese folk tales, In the Land of the Gods: Some Stories of Japan (1905), and she edited the American edition of Tadayoshi Sakurai's Human Bullets: A Soldier's Story of Port Arthur (1907).

Bacon returned to New Haven in 1902 to work on her books and to raise money to support the activities of the civic club she had founded. She also worked to support the foreign mission work of Center Church, and she gave an annual entertainment at Squam Lake Deep Haven Camp, which she conducted in Holderness, New Hampshire, to raise funds for Dixie Hospital. Bacon continued to attend annual meetings of the hospital board and supported improvements in nursing education to meet the requirements for professional registration of nurses. At a special meeting on 5 October 1903, the board adopted her proposal for a new three-year training course. In 1913 a room in Dixie's large new brick hospital building was named for her.

Bacon taught from 1908 to 1910 at Miss Capen's School, a prestigious preparatory school for girls in Northampton, Massachusetts. In her will she bequeathed money to establish a trust fund for the Hampton Training School for Nurses. During her final illness a graduate of Dixie Hospital attended her. Alice Mabel Bacon died in New Haven on 1 May 1918 and was buried there in Grove Street Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Bacon's books and approximately eighty "Silhouettes" columns in Southern Workman between Feb. 1885 and July 1907 document her life, incl. her hospital proposal in 29 (1890): 124–125; family history in Thomas M. Baldwin, Bacon Genealogy: Michael Bacon of Dedham, 1640, and His Descendants (1915); Alice M. Bacon, "A Child's Impressions of Early Hampton," in Armstrong League of Hampton Workers, Hampton Institute, Memories of Old Hampton, 2d ed. (1909), 75–94; Alice Mabel Bacon Papers, Faculty Biographical Files, Samuel Chapman Armstrong Papers, Cora Mae Folsom Papers, Nursing Education Papers, and Dixie Hospital Ledgers, William R. & Norma B. Harvey Library, Hampton University; Cora Mae Folsom, "The Dixie Hospital in the Beginning," Southern Workman 55 (1926): 121–126 (portrait); Patricia E. Sloan, "A History of the Establishment and Early Development of Selected Nurse Training Schools for Afro-Americans: 1886–1906" (Ed.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1978), 121–158; Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895–1925 (1989), 21 (portrait), 28–31; obituaries in New Haven Journal-Courier and New Haven Register, both 3 May 1918; memorial in Southern Workman 47 (1918): 263–264.

Photograph in Southern Workman, 55:121.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Patricia E. Sloan.

How to cite this page:
Patricia E. Sloan, "Alice Mabel Bacon (1858–1918)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1999, rev. 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Bacon_Alice_Mabel, accessed [today's date]).

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