CNHI: Annie Laurie Crawford Papers, 1934-1987

Annie Laurie Crawford was born in western South Carolina, 1904, the oldest of six children. Entering Lander College in 1920, Miss Crawford left after two years to take_up a teaching post in rural South Carolina. She returned to formal studies in 1927, entering the Highland Hospital School of Nursing in North Carolina. She remained there for seven years, first as a student, then a nurse, then as a nursing director of the oldest private psychiatric school of nursing in the country. She went back to school in 1939 at the University of Washington in Seattle. Over the years she also completed graduate studies at Columbia University in New York and at the University of Minnesota.

During World War II Ms. Crawford was commissioned a Naval Reserve nurse and served three years at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital, until 1946. She retired from the Navy with the rank of lieutenant commander. During the 1950s Crawford worked as a psychiatric nursing consultant, first for the state of Minnesota and later for the Florida State Board of Health in Jacksonville. After that, she became director of the staff development project for mental health and psychiatric nursing for the Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta, a job she held for seven years. In the 1970s Crawford headed the nursing section at Tennessee Midsouth Regional Medical Center in Nashville, and was an associate professor at Vanderbilt University there. She retired in 1973 as director of the family nurse clinician and Primex programs at the Vanderbilt School of Nursing. In 1979, she was named among the first 10 honorary fellows of the American Academy of Nursing.