^{Old Main, Central Virginia}

In 1848 slaves in Virginia could be admitted to private asylums if their owners paid for their treatment, but not all owners could afford it and whites were always given priority admission. It was also believed that drapetomania was a mental illness which caused blacks to free captivity. Samuel Cartwright stated that the malady was a consequence of masters who “made themselves too familiar with slaves, treating them as equals.” It’s difficult to imagine what kind of scientific treatment these unfortunate men and women received.

The Confederacy established a hospital in 1862 for wounded soldiers at Howard’s Grove. In 1870 these buildings were re-used for “colored persons of unsound mind” and was the first to offer exclusive treatment to the black population of Virginia.

In 1875 Dorothea Dix visited the newly established institution during her travels for mental health reform and donated pictures and musical instruments.

In 1885 the patients from Howard’s Grove were transferred to a newly constructed red-bricked and gray granite trimmed hospital with a central four-story administration building flanked on either side by a three-story wing comprised of six wards, which is known as the kirkbride plan and was a symbol of moral treatment. The East and West buildings were built on either side of the Main building in 1890 and 1892 to treat the more severe cases.

^{News Clipping, 1900}

The Legislature of 1893 changed the title of state “asylums” to state “hospitals” and the lunatic asylum was renamed a state hospital.

In 1896 the hospital became one of the first to exclusively care for epileptics when a two-story brick pavilion was built. Patients were classified and assigned to wards for the recent and acute, chronic, demented, sick, tubercular, epileptic, criminal and suicidal – the suicidal wards were the least furnished.

Mayfield Cottage was built in 1750 and was the oldest brick residence in the county. The hospital purchased the farm land it was built upon and used it as a storehouse for many years.

^{Occupational Therapy}

In 1904 a one-and-a-half story chapel was constructed as a multi-purpose activities space for worship services, dances, concerts, and graduation ceremonies for the hospital’s nursing students. Its eighty-by-fifty foot gothic-revival design was simple and envisioned by Dr. William Francis Drewry and constructed by G. B. Keeler & Son.

Twenty-four fire hydrants were installed and a fire house was built. Drying machinery was purchased to make laundry more effective and an internal telephone system was installed and a shop for carpentry, shoe mending, broom and mattress making was built as occupational therapy.

^{Building for Chronic Female Patients, 1915}

The building for chronic females was built in 1915 for one-hundred-and-sixty patients along with its counter-part for male patients. In 1925 hydrotherapy tubs were installed on the first floor as a new form of treatment.

The alleged cause of psychosis of those admitted since the opening of the hospital until the year 1915 ranged from abortion, desertion, emancipation, marriage, masturbation, and typhoid fever. Some of the crops grown on the farm were alfalfa, peanuts, wheat, radishes, pumpkins, okra, watermelon, turkey, and milk.

^{Building for Delinquent Girls, 1929}

The building for delinquent or feeble-minded girls was built in 1929 with a one-hundred foot brick and barred arcade leading to the center building of the group.

^{Medical Building, 1929}

In 1930 the new medical building was built for one-hundred beds and with potential for future wings to be added, which they were. The first floor was used for surgery, examinations, dentistry, lectures, x-rays, laboratories, treatment, and drug therapy and the second and third floors were for in-bed patients who were not disturbed by out-patient and ambulatory services downstairs.

In 1938 a State Colony for Epileptics was established on the grounds of the State Hospital and admitted the mentally disabled in 1913. It was renamed a Training School and Hospital in 1954 and then a Training Center in 1971.

In the 1950s the patient population reached four-thousand-eight-hundred when a maximum security forensic building and geriatric unit were constructed. Overcrowding was an increasing problem when the East View ward had three-hundred patients in one large room and patients in the criminal building were sleeping on the floor.

The hospital served only African Americans until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. In 1967 the hospital accepted all races and nationalities. In 1978 Mayfield Cottage was sold to the Caudle family who moved the structure a mile away to save it from demolition and turned it into a bed and breakfast which opened in 1986. In 1980 seventeen-hundred patients were sterilized without their consent. Four out of seven-thousand-two-hundred-and-five individuals sterilized in the state of Virginia filed a class-action lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, which required the state of Virginia to notify every patient who was sterilized between the years 1924 and 1973 and pay for operations to reverse the procedure. In 2010 the chapel was registered on the National Register of Historic Places as a symbol of the state’s unequal treatment of African Americans during the period of segregation.

This is an open ward in the medical building where patients slept and the alcoves were once filled with beds:

Brown bunny rabbit wearing a blue bow tie is painted on the wall of an alcove. I wonder who painted it?

Creative and artistic tiling on a second-story screened-in sun porch where patients would have enjoyed fresh air:

Covered walkway connecting two wards:

The interior of a large, open ward:

Bathtub and showers in a bathroom: