Everyone agrees that Bruce and Helen Miller were very private people. For 65 years, they lived together in a cocoon of love, the last three decades at their home in the Country Club of North Carolina, where the Garden of Eden they created, filled with spectacular azaleas, birds and butterflies, expressed their love of nature.

The Millers adored their Clumber Spaniels as though they were their children—the children they didn’t have. They supported their church, the garden club and the humane society. But when asked to support the hospital, they hesitated.

Like others before them, the Millers were skeptical that a small-town hospital could provide the quality health care they could get at the state’s large medical centers.

It isn’t easy to see the butterfly in the caterpillar.

The community leaders who founded Moore County Hospital, as it was known in the early days, believed that it could be more than just a little local hospital. They had the vision of making it a specialty hospital so that residents of the community wouldn’t have to leave town for what they needed. It took a friend and neighbor to help the Millers experience the transformation.

In the early 1970s, Bruce Miller met his new neighbor and fellow golfer, John Ellis, M.D. Dr. Ellis had just been recruited to establish the total joint replacement program at Pinehurst Surgical Clinic, and his 1973 arrival put Pinehurst on the map as a leading-edge center for joint replacement surgery.

“Surgeons came here from Japan, Korea, Canada, Europe and all over the United States to watch us do joint replacements,” says Dr. Ellis, who retired in 2001, but continues to serve on the Board of Directors of FirstHealth of the Carolinas.

Today, the hospital has one of the largest joint replacement programs in the state and one of the highest success rates in the country.

Dr. Ellis, his wife Nancy and their children became the family that the Millers never had. “We spent every Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve together,” Nancy Ellis recalls, “going to church, having dinner and exchanging presents,” a tradition they continued with Helen after her husband’s death in 2001 and until her death in 2004.

“They gave us presents, sometimes from their world travels, each one symbolic and always accompanied by a long story,” says Anne Friesen, the Ellises’ daughter.

Dr. Ellis was not just Bruce Miller’s good friend; he became his orthopaedic surgeon. “Mr. Miller greatly respected my father and his integrity,” says Anne Friesen. “He learned about the hospital’s growth from him.”

Throughout the next three decades, the hospital transformed itself again and again with major expansions, increased surgical specialties, new equipment and additional staff. Like a butterfly from a cocoon, what emerged from the small rural hospital became one of the best hospitals in the state
and one of the top 100 nationally in heart, vascular and orthopaedic care.

“The quality care they and their friends received here at Moore Regional and FirstHealth Hospice opened their eyes,” Nancy Ellis says of the Millers.

The Millers acknowledged the importance of the hospital to the community by becoming members of the Foundation’s Scroll Society and Circle of Friends. With their support and that of others like them, FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital exceeded the community’s expectations for compassionate care in state-of-the-art facilities—the big-city hospital in a smalltown environment.

A life that touches the hearts of others transcends both life and death. It goes on forever.

Upon the Millers’ passing, their transformation from skeptics to benefactors was complete. The Moore Regional Hospital Foundation and the FirstHealth Hospice Foundation received significant bequests from the couple.

“The Millers were genuinely giving people who were very purposeful in their generosity,” says Mark Vaughn, a member of the Foundation’s Board and its Professional Advisory Committee. “They embraced what became personal to them in their retirement years. They recognized that a comprehensive care facility requires people’s support.”

In recognition of their generous gift, the Foundation of FirstHealth commissioned a work of art by local artist David Hewson.

David Hewson was recommended for the Miller project in the spring of 2005, in part because his family had been associated with the hospital for generations. (See accompanying story.)

According to Anne Friesen, who grew up with him and who was a member of the selection committee, “We wanted a local artist with fine arts training who could create something different that would reflect the Millers’ love for gardening and nature. I’ve seen his work. It’s beautiful.”

After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in sculpture and economics from Guilford College in Greensboro, Hewson studied various techniques, including art restoration and water gilding, in New York, Italy and Switzerland. His work has won numerous awards and appeared in exhibitions throughout the United States, England, Italy and Argentina.

He now specializes in water gilding, a time-consuming process used by the Egyptians 4,500 years ago, and in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. The labor-intensive technique is “very intricate and beautiful,” according to Judy Broadhurst, who owns an art gallery in Pinehurst.

As he was developing the piece that was installed this spring in the hallway connecting the main hospital lobby with the Community Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center, Hewson recalled an article about how a hospital must be about transformation.

The ultimate symbol of transformation is the butterfly.


Like the caterpillar to the butterfly, some part of us—literal, metaphoric, or both—dies in order for something new to be born.

It took Hewson six months to create the three wood panels, each 6 feet by 4 feet, and the free-flying butterflies, using the water-gilding technique unprecedented in a work of this size. Layers of linen and gesso are inscribed with the design, layered with color clays from around the world, gilded with gold, silver and platinum, and burnished with intricate designs.

Each panel is filled with luminous symbols of regeneration and transformation, connected by strands of DNA and the Ring of Eternity.

Hewson hopes that patients, their families, and members of the hospital staff will take a moment as they pass by the art to renew their spirit and, like the butterfly, spread their wings and soar.