Nellie Ann Beatty Wade was the oldest practicing nurse in Florida. She was still working at a country family practice in Wewahitchka when she turned 90 in September 2013, and she was still working when she died two years later.
Nellie Wade
Training and the war
Wade was born in Washington, Pennsylvania on September 21, 1923, to John Edward and Nellie Agnes Beatty, one of eleven children — seven brothers and three sisters.
She trained at Wheeling Hospital in West Virginia in a Cadet Nurse Corps unit, the federal program created by the Bolton Act in 1943 that paid the tuition of some 124,000 American nursing students in exchange for a commitment to stay in essential nursing for the duration of the war. A local television report on her ninetieth birthday said she went on to nurse at a military hospital in Japan. The corps itself was a civilian Public Health Service program rather than a military one, so any service in Japan would have come after the surrender, during the occupation.
Nellie Beatty in uniform
Sixty-seven years in one small town
Wade came to Wewahitchka on a family holiday, liked it, and moved there. She began nursing in the town in 1948 and was licensed as a registered nurse in Florida in October 1952.
She then spent the rest of her working life with a succession of the town's doctors — Dr. Anderson, then Dr. Harold B. Canning for more than thirty years, then Dr. Orr, Dr. Muina and Dr. Blanton, and finally more than twenty years with Dr. Michael Barnes. Along the way she worked as a midwife and, by her family's count, delivered well over a thousand babies in Gulf County and the surrounding country. Wewahitchka had fewer than two thousand residents. A substantial share of the town was born with her in the room.
That kind of career is only possible in rural practice, where one nurse can be the constant across six physicians and three generations of patients.
Not retiring
Asked in 2013 by Meredith TerHaar of WJHG whether she planned to retire, Wade said:
What would I do? Sit and watch the TV all the time? Really and truly, it's not a job, it's not a chore. I've always worked and I love it.
She died in early December 2015, at 92, still on the practice's staff. Her service was held in the Wewahitchka High School gymnasium, the largest room in town.
Related
Sources
- At 90, Nellie Wade of Wewahitchka is the Oldest Licensed Practicing Nurse in Florida. WJHG, Meredith TerHaar, 2013. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Nellie Wade obituary. Panama City News Herald, December 5, 2015. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, 1943 to 1948. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Accessed September 9, 2026.