The Herald-Zeitung

Eden Home celebrates 100 years in 2010 with a new name and plans for a $30 million expansion to meet the needs of retiring Baby Boomers.

Home to some 350 retirees, Eden Home is a faith-based, nonprofit, continuing care retirement community on the hill above Landa Park in New Braunfels. It is affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

Eden Home will now be “Eden Hill Communities,” according to Ann Whitis, director of marketing. And developers hope to break ground on a 90-room expansion with a pool, wellness center, restaurants, a bistro, and two separate assisted living neighborhoods dedicated to care for people with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Everything we’re doing is mindful of our heritage, but with an eye to the future,” Whitis said.

“I’m just glad they’re keeping the name ‘Eden,’” said resident Dorothy Rest.

Rest has watched Eden Hill go through many transformations over the years. She points to her father, Theo Schumacher, in a black-and-white photo of a 1956 groundbreaking.

“He’s the short man with his hair sticking up,” she said with a smile.

Little did her father know that the facility he would help build as a board member would one day change so much and be home to his daughter, now 89 years old.

SUB: A long hill to climb

Founded in 1910 on the south side of San Antonio with a grant of $10,000, the original Eden Home was designed for retired priests.

In 1956, the facility was moved to New Braunfels and over the years it grew to include freestanding homes for independent living as well as assisted living units and medical care.

“In the old days, you went to the old home to die. Now you go to live,” said Carl Lavin.

Lavin, 96 and a resident of Eden Hill, remembers cranking the old chapel organ as a child at Eden Home in San Antonio. The same organ played at his wedding to Martha, whose father was a superintendent of the facility and who last week celebrated her 91st birthday at Eden Hill. The organ is on display near the chapel at Eden Hill today.

“If they would see it today they would be amazed,” Carl said of his forebears.

“The mission has changed,” said Elmo Fischer, who was a supervisor of Eden Home from 1961 to 1969. Fischer, 93, is also a resident of the facility he helped shape.

Nursing homes were once “deplorable,” Fischer said. The rise of the nuclear family after World War II meant that families who traditionally took care of aging parents were now moving off of family homesteads.

“None of that was good for older folks,” Fischer said.

For years after the war, nursing home care was unregulated and rife with abuses, Fischer said. Then, in 1960, Congress passed the Hill-Burton Act, bringing needed state and federal funds to hospitals and nursing homes along with strict regulations and standards.

Eden Home always followed high standards in the German “Altenheim” tradition — what’s called the “spectrum of care” today, Fischer said. But it was under Fischer’s watch that crews built medical facilities and expanded living quarters.

It is now home to a dedicated Alzheimer’s unit.

Fischer said he is “in awe” of the expansion plans.

“It’s a big undertaking,” Fischer said, but one necessary to help take care of an aging population, especially as Baby Boomers retire.

Developers will open a sales office in January 2010 and there will be centennial celebrations for Eden Hill throughout the year, including the organization’s annual gala in March.