Alice Ethel Bland
World War I Veteran
By Camille Arbogast
Alice Ethel Bland was born on August 12, 1885, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, to Alice Lavinia (Shay) and Samuel Bland. Samuel, who was born in England, married Alice Lavinia around 1884. They also had a younger daughter, Ida, born in 1892. Samuel was a machinist; directories specify he was a rivet maker.
The Blands immigrated to the United States on October 4, 1897, taking the train from Sherbrooke to Boston. They settled in Quincy, Massachusetts. In 1900, they lived on Highland Avenue; a year later they moved to 25 North Central Avenue. Alice graduated from the Wollaston School in June 1902. She also attended two years of high school, according to the 1940 census. In February 1904, Alice Lavina died of phthisis pulmonalis (or tuberculosis) in Gardner, Massachusetts. Samuel and his daughters remained in Quincy, living at 5 Prospect Avenue in 1906. He remarried in September 1907, wedding Margaret Lycett, a millworker from Weymouth, Massachusetts. In 1910, Samuel, Margaret, Alice, and Ida were living at 245 Newbury Avenue. Alice was a leather worker and Ida was an order clerk at a leather firm. Ida married in June 1913. Around that time, Samuel, Margaret, and Alice moved to 107 East Squantum Street. Alice was hired as a nurse at a Massachusetts state infirmary on October 8, 1913. She graduated from the nursing program at the State Infirmary at Tewksbury, Massachusetts, on September 23, 1916.
Alice entered the Army Nurse Corps on December 21, 1917. When she enlisted, she gave as her address 20 Mount Vernon Street in Dorchester, the home of her cousin Agnes O’Court. Her stepmother, care of a post office box in Hanover, Connecticut, was her next of kin. Alice was initially sent to the Army Base Hospital at Fort McPherson, in Atlanta, Georgia.
On July 27, 1918, she moved to the Mobilization Station in New York. One of Alice’s colleagues later described the conditions there: “The nurses stood patiently in long lines in the super-heated corridors of the mobilization station, with hundreds of others, waiting for assignment.” Alice was assigned to Base Hospital 51, a unit formed in Boston. The nursing staff consisted of a “Chief Nurse, ninety-nine nurses, and one dietitian.” At their initial meeting, the nurses decided by vote to “be a democratic Unit, that in every subject affecting the good name or general comfort of Unit No. 51, the majority should rule, the Chief Nurse giving the final vote.” They had a song they sang to the tune of Yankee Doodle: “We’re a Boston Unit going out, To help beat the Kaiser; And when we’ve finished up our work, He’ll sadder be and wiser.”
Alice sailed with the nurses of Base Hospital 51 on the troopship France IV on August 25, 1918, arriving in Brest, France, on September 4. From there, the nurses traveled by train to Toul, the location of Base Hospital Number 51, which was part of the Justice Hospital Center. The hospital had a bed capacity of 2,000 and treated 12,505 patients.
The hospital was near to the action of the Saint Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. So close were they, that the hospital often served as an evacuation hospital rather than a base hospital, receiving wounded directly from the battlefield. During the Saint Mihiel offensive “the flame of the barrage lighted the windows and buildings vibrated to the shock, as the great guns boomed.” As the battle continued, “lines of ambulances” delivering a “steady stream of our wounded” began arriving, continuing “for four terrible days and nights.” According to her obituary, Alice “was gassed while on duty with combat troops in France.” She may have been part of one of the two smaller groups of Base Hospital 51 nurses who were sent closer to the front during the offensives.
After the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the hospital cared for many ex-prisoners of war, as well as influenza patients. The chief nurse estimated that about ten percent of the nurses fell ill with influenza. Base Hospital 51 ceased operations on March 31, 1919. On May 20, Alice sailed from Brest, France, on the USS Mobile, with the Casual Nurse Detachment Number 25. She arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, on May 30. Back in the United States she worked at a Demobilization Station until her discharge on July 19, 1919.
After the war, Alice continued to work as a nurse in general practice. She lived with her cousin Agnes, Agnes’s children, and another cousin at 20 Mount Vernon Street. While Alice was overseas, in April 1918, her sister Ida had died of bronchial pneumonia. Ida’s obituary suggested that their father, Samuel, had also died by 1918. On March 27, 1920, Alice became an American citizen. Her petition for citizenship was witnessed by two fellow nurses, Elizabeth E. Mahon of Brookline, and Bessie A. Wadleigh of Jamaica Plain.
By the late 1920s, Alice had moved to California, living in Los Angeles at 837 Westlake Avenue. She may have moved to California for her health, as her obituary stated that due to having been gassed during the war she “suffered ill effects from the poison the remainder of her life.” In April 1930, she was sharing an apartment at 1736 West 24th Street, Los Angeles, with another nurse, Lillian C. McAdams, a widowed Canadian. Lillian was a trained nurse working in a hospital. According to the 1930 census, Alice, too, was a trained nurse but she was currently unemployed.
On November 25, 1930, Alice married Ralph Choate Shepherd in Los Angeles. Born in 1882, Ralph was originally from Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he had run his family’s market, J.C. Shepherd Meat and Grocery on Main Street. Previously married, he had three children. His middle child died in 1915 at age seven. He and his first wife moved to California in 1927 where he managed a grocery store.
In 1932, Alice, Ralph, and Ralph’s adult son Joseph lived at 930 North Haywood Avenue. By 1938, they had moved to 12206 Cantura Avenue in Studio City, North Hollywood, Alice’s home for the rest of her life. Alice was active with the Los Angeles unit of the Women’s Overseas Service League; of which she was the service chairman. The organization was dedicated to “philanthropic and patriotic activities,” which included purchasing war bonds, working with the Red Cross, USO and “kindred organizations,” as well the “raising and disbursing of funds for disabled ex-service women.”
Alice died on March 29, 1953, at the Veterans Administration Hospital on Wilshire and Sawtelle Boulevards in West Los Angeles. A funeral service was held for her at the Sawtelle Veterans Chapel. She was buried in the Veterans Administration cemetery in Los Angeles, now known as Los Angeles National Cemetery.
Sources
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Naturalization Records. National Archives at Boston, Waltham, Massachusetts; Ancestry.com
Quincy, Massachusetts, directories, various years; Ancestry.com
City Document NO. 14: Inaugural Address of the Mayor City Government of 1903 Together with the Annual Reports of the Officers of the City of Quincy, Massachusetts, For The Year 1902. Quincy: Advertiser Steam Job Print, 1903 :102; Archive.org
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Sixty-Third Annual Report of the Trustees of the State Infirmary at Tewksbury. Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co, 1917: 17; Ancestry.com
Coleman, Laura E. “Experiences of the Justice Hospital Group, Base Hospital 51.” The American Journal of Nursing. Vol 19, No 12 (Sept 1919), Lippincott Williams & Wilkins: 931-939; Jstor.org
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