Frontier Nursing Service

The Frontier Nursing Service provides healthcare services to rural, underserved populations and educates nurse-midwives.

The Service maintains six rural healthcare clinics in eastern Kentucky, the Mary Breckinridge Hospital, the Mary Breckinridge Home Health Agency, the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing and the Bed and Breakfast Inn at Wendover, Kentucky. This was founded by Mary Breckenridge.

The organization was founded in 1925 in Leslie County, Kentucky by Mary Breckinridge (Lived: 1881-1965; Director: 1925-1965) shortly after she had witnessed the operation of the Highlands and Islands Medical Service which had been founded in Scotland twelve years earlier. Breckinridge intended that the Frontier Nursing Service would provide healthcare for children in remote rural areas, being moved to this work by the deaths of her own two children. Frontier Nursing Service was the first group in the United States to employ nurses who are also qualified midwives. Originally, the organization was known as the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies.

The Frontier Nursing Service grew rapidly during its first five years. With the help of two nurses, Edna Rockstroh and Freda Caffin, Breckinridge opened the group's first clinic in Hyden, Kentucky in 1925. By December of that year Breckinridge had raised a log house in Wendover, Kentucky, called the Big House, that became her home the Frontier Nursing Service's headquarters. The Hyden Hospital and Health Center opened its doors in 1928 and followed by nine outpost nursing centers in Leslie County and the Red Bird River section of Clay County, Kentucky.

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