Inside MMH: 50+ Years of Healthcare

The Ground Beneath Our Hospital: The Joplin Family, the Land, and More Than 50 Years of Healthcare

Part of McCurtain Memorial Hospital’s continuing series explaining our history, operations, and relationship with the community we serve.

As we continue our effort to tell the story of McCurtain Memorial Hospital and answer questions from the community about how the hospital operates, one subject has come up repeatedly: Who owns the land beneath McCurtain Memorial Hospital, and how does the arrangement actually work?

The answer takes us back more than half a century and to a family whose generosity helped make the hospital we know today possible.

A Gift of Opportunity From the Joplin Family

In the late 1960s, as community leaders worked toward establishing a new hospital to serve McCurtain County and the surrounding region, Mr. and Mrs. Joplin owned property along Lincoln Road in Idabel. They believed in the vision of a modern hospital that could provide healthcare close to home, and they believed their property was an ideal location for it.

The Joplins pledged the use of the land for that purpose.

The arrangement was unique and important. The property could be used for the operation of a hospital or clinic, allowing generations of McCurtain County residents to benefit from healthcare services at the site. At the same time, the Joplin family retained a reversionary interest: if the hospital ceased operating at the property, the land would revert to the Joplins or their heirs under the terms of the arrangement.

That distinction is important when discussing who "owns" the hospital property today. The arrangement surrounding the land is not as simple as an ordinary purchase of real estate. It reflects an agreement made decades ago for a specific community purpose — providing healthcare.

And more than 50 years later, that purpose continues.

How the County, Hospital Authority and MMMM, Inc. Fit Together

In previous installments of this series, we discussed another part of the hospital's history that sometimes causes confusion: the relationship among McCurtain County, the McCurtain County Hospital Authority, and McCurtain Memorial Medical Management, Inc. (MMMM, Inc.), which does business as McCurtain Memorial Hospital.

Since the early 1970s, the hospital property has operated through a lease and sublease structure. McCurtain County entered into a long-term lease arrangement with the Hospital Authority, and the Hospital Authority subsequently subleased the hospital property to MMMM, Inc., the private, not-for-profit corporation that operates McCurtain Memorial Hospital.

That structure has existed in one form or another for more than five decades.

The underlying Joplin arrangement is another layer of that history. It explains why discussions about the hospital property sometimes involve not only the County, Hospital Authority and MMMM, Inc., but also the Joplin heirs and their claimed interest in what happens to the land if hospital operations at the site ever cease.

2022 and the Proposal for a New Hospital

The significance of the Joplin family's interest became particularly visible during events surrounding the proposed construction of a new hospital in 2022.

During the summer of that year, the McCurtain County Board of County Commissioners approved placing a measure before voters concerning the construction of a new hospital. The proposal contemplated relocating hospital operations from the longstanding Lincoln Road campus to a new facility at a site near the Idabel Airport.

McCurtain County voters overwhelmingly supported the proposal. The measure carried all 30 precincts in McCurtain County and received nearly 65 percent of the vote.

For a community that has depended upon local healthcare for generations, that level of support demonstrated something important: residents believed strongly in preserving and strengthening access to hospital care in McCurtain County.

The election, however, became the subject of litigation challenging its validity. That dispute ultimately reached the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where the election was overturned.

At approximately the same time, the heirs of the Joplin family pursued litigation of their own. Their concern involved the original arrangement governing the Lincoln Road property. If McCurtain Memorial Hospital moved to the proposed airport location and hospital operations ceased at 1301 E. Lincoln Road, the heirs wanted their rights concerning the reversion of the property clearly protected.

That issue illustrates why the history of this land still matters today.

The Joplin Interest Today

In the years since the 2022 proposal, representatives of the Joplin heirs have communicated with various parties regarding what they describe as their interest in the property. According to the heirs, those communications have included the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, McCurtain County and MMMM, Inc., and have involved discussions about potentially purchasing their interest in the land.

It is important to distinguish that interest from the hospital simply being "for sale" or someone having the ability to take possession of an operating hospital campus.

The historical arrangement concerns what happens if the qualifying healthcare use of the property ends. As it has been described and understood, cessation of the hospital or clinic use contemplated by the original agreement would trigger the Joplin family's reversionary rights - but not until. Any such purchase would be of no value to anyone or any entity interested in purchasing the heirs' rights and for this reason MMMM, Inc. and others have to-date declined to make a serious offer. McCurtain County did, however, in 2024, make an offer of a few hundred thousand dollars unofficially.

Today, of course, McCurtain Memorial Hospital remains very much in operation at 1301 E. Lincoln Road.

More Than a Piece of Land

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is what has happened on this property since the Joplin family first made it available for healthcare more than half a century ago.

The campus of today bears little resemblance to the property that existed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As medicine changed, the hospital changed with it.

The hospital building received significant additions and modifications over the decades.

Spaces have been constructed, expanded, repurposed and remodeled to accommodate new technology and new ways of delivering care. The Emergency Department evolved. Radiology changed dramatically as medical imaging advanced. The laboratory, medical records areas, therapy services and numerous other departments have been relocated, renovated or redesigned throughout the life of the facility.

Those changes continue today.

In 2024, McCurtain Memorial Hospital added the Community Center to the front portion of the campus, creating a new space designed not simply for hospital operations, but for bringing people together. More recently, the hospital completed an outdoor seating and dining area near the main entrance, continuing our efforts to make the campus more welcoming for patients, employees, visitors and families.

Every generation has left its mark on this property.

What began as land along Lincoln Road became a hospital campus. That campus became an emergency room in the middle of the night, a laboratory processing critical tests, a radiology department finding answers, a place for rehabilitation and recovery, a workplace for generations of McCurtain County families, and a place where countless residents have experienced some of the most important moments of their lives.

A Promise That Continues

There is something especially meaningful about the original Joplin arrangement when viewed more than 50 years later.

Mr. and Mrs. Joplin could not have known exactly what healthcare would look like in 2026. They could not have predicted CT scanners, modern laboratory technology, electronic medical records or many of the services that would eventually be provided on the property they made available.

But they understood something much simpler: this community needed a hospital.

Their willingness to make the land available helped provide a permanent home for that vision, while the arrangement they established ensured that the property remained connected to the healthcare purpose they believed in.

Today, McCurtain Memorial Hospital continues that purpose.

As we have shared throughout this series, understanding MMH requires understanding the many pieces of its history. The County has a role. The Hospital Authority has a role. MMMM, Inc. has a role as the organization operating the hospital. The community has played an enormous role through generations of support. And woven into that history is the generosity and foresight of a family who, more than half a century ago, believed their land could become something bigger than the land itself.

It did.

Today, at 1301 E. Lincoln Road in Idabel, the hospital continues to grow, change and serve — on the same ground where a family once helped make a community's vision for better healthcare possible.

More than 50 years later, that vision remains alive.