A place to rest in the countryside

BY KRISTIN BEUSCHER NORTHERN VALLEY PRESS NORWOOD

Opened 110 years ago, the Norcroft was a sanitarium housed in a lovely Victorian home in the rural countryside of Norwood.

Sanitarium is an unfamiliar term in the 21st century. Oneʼs first instinct might be to associate the term with mental illness, due to its similarity with sanity. However, a sanitarium, derived from the Latin sanitas (health), actually referred to a type of health resort popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. People who went to sanitariums, which were supervised by doctors, might have been convalescing from sickness or surgery, hoping to alleviate a chronic ill- ness, or looking for a period of rest to improve their overall health.

Norwood would have been an ideal setting for such a facility. Decades before antibiotics were discovered, the only available course for treating many diseases, especially respiratory ailments like tuberculosis, would have been rest, a good diet, and an abundance of fresh air. Norwood, with its rural atmosphere and a population of just 564 people in 1910, offered clean air and tranquility in abundance. Advertisements for the Norcroft appeared in New York City newspapers during the years 1913 to 1915.

Eva W. Lake, M.D. was the doctor in charge of the Norcroft. At a time when females accounted for only about 5% of ph ysicians in the United States, Lake (1858–1926) studied at the Womenʼs Medical College in Philadelphia, gaining her medical license in 1894. By then she was already 36 years old and a married mother of five.

Early on, Dr. Lake practiced medicine in Pleasantville, Atlantic County. Later she and husband Vincent (a mechanical engineer and inventor who was interesting in his own right) moved to Norwood, where she opened the Norcroft in 1913. Her third child, Mabelle, in her 30s at the time, lived with them and helped run the facility Mabelle was a lawyer, one of very few women in that profession in the 1910s. The Lakes were a family ahead of their time, indeed.

Advertisements for the Norcroft never specify its exact location, and this was years before house numbers existed locally. The 1915 state census does say that the Lake family lived on Blanch Avenue in Norwood. Dr. Lake later lived in Demarest. She was active with the Demarest Baptist Church and was a Sunday school teacher