Tombstone Tales: Highland Hospital fire victim Sarah Hipps

EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone has a story — some more well-known than others. Across Western North Carolina, so much history is buried below the surface. Six feet under. With this series, we introduce you to some of the people who have left marks big and small on this special place we call home.

Sarah Vance Neely (1898-1948) was one of nine people who died in a fire at Highlands Hospital.

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The tragic fire that killed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda also killed eight others. Here’s one of their stories.

Sarah Vance Neely was born to John and Julia Neely on June 23, 1898, in Asheville. Sarah married physician and surgeon Dr. Allen Thurman Hipps in 1922. Dr. Hipps was a veteran of World War I.

Mrs. Hipps was a nurse and participated in the Asheville chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy in her spare time.

Dr. Hipps died on Oct. 31, 1943, of an unknown illness that lasted only six days, leaving Sarah a widow, according to The Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper that day.

Sarah Hipps was a victim of one of the most infamous fires in Asheville history — the blaze that destroyed the Central building of Highland Hospital, killing nine on the morning of March 11, 1948. Hipps was 49.

That night, a nurse had given sedatives to patients to help them sleep, something that she claimed was standard practice at Highland. All nine victims of the fire had been sedated.

Unlike most of the other victims, Hipps and another patient, Mrs. Kennedy, were extracted from the inferno before the building fully collapsed. Hipps and Kennedy died two hours after their rescue while in the care of anesthetist Ellen Heiser, who reportedly fought to resuscitate the victims from the time of rescue until a coroner pronounced them dead. Dr. P.R. Terry listed their deaths as asphyxiation.

Members of the Buncombe County Medical Society attended her funeral on March 12, 1948. The funeral was held at First Baptist Church of Asheville, where Hipps was a member.

Nearly two years later, the families of the victims settled with Duke University, who owned Highland Hospital, for $3,000 per victim, roughly $68,000 in today’s money. The July 4, 1950, issue of The Asheville Times reported the families initially fought for $400,000 to be divided among the victims’ surviving relatives, around $9 million today.

To learn more about the Highland Hospital fire that took the lives of Sarah Hipps, Zelda Fitzgerald (wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald) and seven others, click here.