There was Dr. Kate Winborne, and there was Mr. Larry Winborne. A general surgeon and a businessman. Husband and wife. Together they built something this community needed more than it had words for.
Long before Hattiesburg looked the way it does now, this building was more than a pharmacy. During segregation, when Black families across the Pine Belt were turned away from the hospitals that served everyone else, this is where they came for care. Dr. Kate Winborne practiced here. She performed surgery here. The Katie Avenue building was a clinic and an operating room. For a generation of Black families in this region, it was the closest thing to a hospital they had access to.
In the late 1980s, Dr. Kate moved her surgical practice to Methodist Hospital, and from there to Forrest General, where she became the first Black female surgeon in the state of Mississippi and rose to head of general surgery. For decades, nearly every new physician arriving in Hattiesburg trained under her hands. Doctors building their first residencies, expanding their first practices, finding their footing in a state that had not yet made room for them.
“She made room.”
When Dr. Kate stepped away from the pharmacy, she did not let it close. Mr. Larry kept running it. He partnered with Gladys Barnett, the pharmacist who served as Pharmacist in Charge and held the line for decades. Through every shift in the industry, the doors stayed open. The community kept coming. The standard never dropped.
Every prescription that leaves Fairview honors what they started.
