San Bernardino County history: San Antonio Regional Hospital

Group of medical staff posing on the steps of San Antonio Hospital in 1907.

The original San Antonio Hospital in Upland was located at the corner of San Antonio Avenue and Arrow Highway.�

Black and white photo of Dr. William Howard Craig standing outdoors.

Dr. William Howard Craig served the Upland community as a general practitioner and surgeon for 37 years.

San Antonio Hospital is a 363-bed acute care hospital that treated its first patient in 1907, just a year after Upland incorporated as a city. At the time, Upland was an up-and-coming community with nearly 1,500 residents, six churches, two banks and several busy merchant establishments. The original hospital was located at the corner of San Antonio Avenue and Arrow Highway with just 18 beds and five physicians.

The quaint configuration of that stone building placed the hospital’s operating room upstairs in the southwest corner, while the men’s ward was downstairs in the northeast corner. As a result, Dr. John Craig, the young son of the hospital’s founder, Dr. William Howard Craig, was in demand both as a surgeon and anesthesiologist, but also as the only member of the hospital staff who was strong enough to carry a patient up and down the stairs.

By 1922, the population of the hospital’s service area had more than doubled, producing the need for a much larger hospital. Dr. William Craig solicited the aid of his friend and patient, Frances Mary Paul, who had demonstrated a long-standing concern regarding the medical needs of her community.

Donating $75,000 toward construction of a new, larger hospital, Frances Mary Paul became the first benefactor of the “new” San Antonio Hospital on San Bernardino Road. The word “community” was added to the name to convey its nonprofit charitable status. San Antonio Community Hospital was dedicated on Wednesday, July 30, 1924. The new hospital had 35 rooms with a capacity for 50 patients and a maternity wing with a nursery large enough to care for 20 babies.

In 2015, San Antonio Community Hospital officially changed its name to San Antonio Regional Hospital to reflect the hospital’s expanded scope of services and its growing service area in the region. Today, the hospital has a staff of over 600 physicians and more than 2,500 care team members. The hospital’s services and technologies are at the leading edge of medical science in ways that the hospital’s forebears could not have imagined — with the mission of improving the health and well-being of those the hospital serve.

For more information, please visit https://www.sarh.org/about-us/history.

Content submitted by San Antonio Regional Hospital.

Additional County Update News – October 23, 2025