Dr. Wiley excited to practice at restored Tigerton Clinic

ThedaCare clinic reopened Jan. 18

Dr. Jasmine Wiley can’t wait to return to her practice at the restored ThedaCare Family Medicine - Tigerton after what she called the “ultimate fixer-up, clinic edition.”

“Our patients are so excited to have us back, and we are, too,” she said. The clinic has seven employees. Wiley feels the mansion’s recently completed restoration not only brought back the character of the historic structure but also added to the life of the building.

The clinic, 110 Cedar St., Tigerton, reopened Jan. 18. It will again offer family medicine, laboratory services, X-rays, obstetrics care and minor surgical procedures.

As she is devoted to family practice, she sees all ages in her one day a week each at the Tigerton and Clintonville clinics and two days at the Shawano Clinic.

ThedaCare leases the clinic space on the first floor of the mansion from Tigerton Clinic Inc., a nonprofit organization. The organization was formed more than 70 years ago as the Tigerton Cooperative Hospital with the goal of ensuring that health care services are provided in the community. The organization has contributed about $60,000 to the recent remodeling project. The corporation was not identified as the owner in an earlier edition of the Wittenberg Enterprise-Birnamwood News.

Wiley hopes to have a reopening celebration later in the year. In the meantime, she said videos of the clinic are available on the ThedaCare website.

Patients will see the original cork flooring, windows in doors with the paint removed, woodwork restored and original tile flooring revealed — some of it for the first time in decades.

Wiley, a 2006 Clintonville High School graduate, traces her commitment to medical practice in the area to her undergraduate studies that included time at the Shawano and Tigerton clinics. Wiley, a University of Wisconsin-Madison medical school graduate, always planned to come home to practice medicine. But she also chose to do her residency at Aurora St. Luke’s in Milwaukee because she wanted to see the greatest variety of situations and medical conditions.

During that time, she came to feel the “character, the charisma” of the Tigerton building, built in 1920 by Herman Swanke, Tigerton Lumber Company owner, as his home.

“I always thought it would be really neat if it were restored to its original glory,” she said.

She likes to think that not just Swanke but all of the people who were born or worked in the building when it was a hospital would be pleased with the restoration.The hospital operated from 1950 to 1978.

What started out as a much-needed upgrade to the electrical system became a much larger restoration. Wiley said the building is now more accessible for disabled patients and features a more accessible lab area, among other improvements.Wiley said she appreciates what the building means to the community — not just as a clinic but as a historical asset.

“That’s part of the reason I split my time at the clinics. Each one is so special to its community,” Wiley said. She added a rural area like Tigerton is fortunate to have this level of health care available.

“It’s been their medical home for a long time,” she added, observing it’s difficult for many elderly patients to get to Clintonville or Shawano.

Margaret Anderson, nurse-practitioner, is available 3.5 days a week at the clinic as well, Wiley said.

The closure of the clinic due to COVID-19 concerns matched Wiley’s planned sabbatical, so she “dug in” to restoration tasks.

While Wiley declined to be called an expert after her days of restoring tile, matching paint and scraping carpet glue, she said she was an “expert in consulting the experts.”

“It’s so fun to see everyone get so excited about the restoration,” Wiley said. She gave a huge shout-out to all of the volunteers and tradespeople, including retired clinic employees, who worked on the project.

She added it was a “unique, small-town thing to have people pitch in,” even if only to drop off cleaning supplies or provide snacks.

Wiley said she thinks the staff is even more excited than she is with the reopening, although some insist the mansion is haunted.

The doctor said that if there are ghosts, they’re friendly. What isn’t spooky is seeing the relics of hospital and clinic equipment that have been unearthed during the restoration — a reminder of how far the technology in medicine has come in the past years, she said.