93-year-old Lillie Gilliam spent two years at Waverly Hills Sanatorium when she was 14. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)Lillie Gilliam beat the odds.“I was so sickly the doctor said, ‘She's not gonna live to be 15,’” Gilliam said. “He was wrong.”But when she was 14, in the late 1940s, Gilliam wa s very ill. After a chest X-ray and other tests, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, or TB, she said.Gilliam was the only member of her family — out of seven siblings and her parents — to contract the deadly lung disease.By then, tuberculosis wasn’t a leading cause of death in the United States, but it was still dangerous and contagious. And research shows it was historically more fatal for Black people, killing them at more than double the overall rate nationally around the year 1900.In 1945, 63,000 people in the U.S. died from TB, according to the National Library of Medicine. There were 115,000 new cases that year. The patients were often treated at sanatoriums, including in Jefferson County.Gilliam had finished her first semester at Central High School when she was admitted to Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville. Waverly Hills Sanatorium closed in 1961. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)She said it was “heartbreaking” to leave behind her friends and family and she said, at times, she was embarrassed.“When you're 14 years old and all your friends are going to school, and everything. How would you feel walking up and telling them, ‘Hey, I have TB,’ when it was a very contagious disease?” she said. “I was just ashamed to tell anybody I had TB because, at that time, it was a dreaded disease.”But Gilliam was not admitted to the 500-patient, four-story brick facility, towering over the hills off Dixie Highway that is today rumored to be haunted.“At that time, there were two Waverlys: the Waverly for the African Americans, and then the Waverly for the white population,” Gilliam said.The sanatorium for Black patients was a 28-room wooden building. It was much smaller than the hospital for white patients, Waverly’s most well-known structure.Patients referred to the all-white facility as “up on the hill.” Gilliam said she only ever went to the operating room there.“I had a two-thirds of my right lung removed,” she said. “And you had to go on the hill to have surgery. There was no such thing as a surgery down there. And you stayed up there, maybe for as long as they felt you necessary. They weren't unkind. They were very nice.”Segregated sanatoriumsUnder Jim Crow, segregated sanatoriums were the norm in the South.“The segregation is by law in Virginia and Kentucky and across the South,” said Virginia Tech history professor Tom Ewing. “Other parts of the country obviously did not have the same laws on racial segregation, but may well have done other forms, [such as] segregating patients by income or class.”Ewing typically studies diseases like Russian influenza, but he took an interest in tuberculosis research after a bike ride through rural Virginia took him to Catawba Sanatorium, a whites-only treatment facility like Waverly.Black patients in Virginia went to Piedmont Sanatorium. The hospital is two-and-a-half hours away from Catawba, and Ewing says there were few historical records of the place.“I had been driving by Piedmont for almost 30 years without realizing what it was,” he said.More than 12,000 Black TB patients were sent there in the first half of the 20th century. Piedmont Sanatorium also became a place where 350 women were taught under one of the first advanced nursing programs in TB care for Black nurses.Ewing helped dedicate a historical marker there in 2022.Searching for WaverlyPiedmont Sanatorium is now a geriatric hospital. But at Waverly, property owner Charlie Mattingly explained there is almost nothing left of the building for Black patients.“It burned down way before I got up here. This would have had to be in the early ‘60s,” Mattingly said.On a snowy afternoon, Mattingly’s trudged through three inches of ice and snow that completely enveloped a vacant lot down the hill from the main Waverly building. He pointed his gloved hand toward an untouched area behind a suburban neighborhood.Waverly's owner Charlie Mattingly said he was told a group of kids vandalized the property decades ago and burned down the hospital for Black TB patients. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)He said he had to do some digging, but he found where he thinks the hospital for Black patients once stood.“I know about where the building was because of where I've dug down and found the drainage leaving from it and the utilities running into it,” Mattingly said.The two hospitals shared a boiler system back then.Mattingly, who has owned Waverly for 25 years, said he hopes to put a historical marker there so no one can ever build on the land.“I'll put it where I believe the hospital set because, it's just marking where maybe thousands of people maybe came to get cured, or maybe they didn't,” he said.A lifetime of serviceLillie Gilliam was released from Waverly at 16, just before graduating from Central High School.Although she was admitted to Waverly, Gilliam still received education. She said one teacher taught three different grade levels, so classes could include younger students.“No chemistry. No algebra. No trigonometry. No kind of science. We just had the basics, the English and stuff like that because that's all they could teach,” Gilliam said. “We were in a room with a large table, and the three of us and the teacher, and that was it.”Although she was embarrassed to go to Waverly when she was younger, she looks back now with pride in her experience.“Even after being out of high school all of that time, I still graduated with the upper quartile of my class,” she said.She said she didn’t want to go to college until her father made an interesting point.“He said, ‘Young lady, they took your lung, not your brain,’” she said.She got a bachelor’s in medical technology from Nazareth College, which is now Spalding University. She spent decades working for doctors in California and Kentucky.For the last 25 years, she’s worked full time as a phlebotomist at the University of Louisville’s South End Medical Center in Shively.“I just don't have enough words to explain how good and how kind and how gracious they are to me,” she said about the staff. “If I walk in that office, I mean you’d think President Obama had walked in there.”Gilliam said she has no plans of retiring and will continue to serve patients just like the nurses did for her, nearly 80 years ago. ...read more read less