An African American physician in Hopkinsville provided a swimming pool for black residents of the community in the 1930s. He was Patterson Tilford Frazer, a native of Allensville in Todd County, where he lived on a tenant farm with his parents and seven siblings.
Frazer’s Natatorium was at his home at 921 Hayes St. (A natatorium is a pool, which is typically indoors.)
“It was a rare thing to have such a facility for African Americans in the 1930s,” the Notable Kentucky African American Database states in an entry about Frazer.
Around 1901, when Frazer was 12 years old, he moved to Hopkinsville to attend Hopkinsville Male and Female College. His uncle, also named Patterson Frazer, was a minister and principal of the school for elementary and high school students. The school could board about 50 students, but Frazer lived with his uncle’s family. (The school later became the Hopkinsville College of the Bible, which operates today on Vine Street.)
In 1913, Frazer earned his medical degree at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Two years later, he opened a practice in Cadiz, according to the book “African American Doctors of World War I: The Lives of 104 Volunteers.”
In 1917, Frazer was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Medical Reserves Corps. He served for less than a year and returned to civilian life to open a medical practice in Hopkinsville. According to city directories, Frazer had offices on East Sixth Street and, later, on South Virginia Street.
Frazer and his second wife, Lue Bernice Clark, of Chicago, lived on Hayes Street, where he had the swimming pool built.
“They were still there when Dr. Frazer passed away at the age of 57 on March 30, 1947,” the book on WWI black doctors states. “He died after having been ill for 11 days with influenza and pneumonia.”
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
