H: Hospitals

This is the historic McHugh House in Fort Collins, also known as the "House of the Mayors," because, ta-daa, a couple of mayors once lived there. (Now it houses a fly fishing shop.) Construction began in 1885 but was not completed until 1888. The second owner added a carriage house behind. Two later owners, Jessie Harris and Peter J. McHugh, were the mayors in question. McHugh was also a doctor and converted the carriage house into a hospital. The carriage house is still standing, too:

Fast forward a few years to 1925, when our modern hospital system began as The Larimer County Hospital. It had 40 beds and sat adjacent to 40 acres of farm- and ranchland. After World War II, the capacity more than doubled to 86 beds. In the 1960s, the hospital was renamed Poudre Valley Memorial Hospital and started growing by leaps and bounds. "Memorial" was dropped from the name in 1982, resulting in what we residents call PVH. I decided to include it in this year's A to Z because I was born there (back in the "Memorial" era), and so were both my boys. Yeah, I'm sentimental like that.

The "old" side

The "new" side