Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

Hidden Columbia, a local news segment on ABC’s Columbia, SC affiliate, recently put together a report on the history of South Carolina State Hospital. It’s a reasonably in-depth look at the hospital’s story with a few surprising details among the typical, to-be-expected facts. You can view all five currently released parts online by following the links below. I’m not sure if there are more parts coming in the future, but I’ll add the links here if they do.

Hidden Columbia
Unfortunately, these videos are no longer available online.

1. The State Carolina State Hospital Part 1
2. The State Carolina State Hospital Part 2
3. The State Carolina State Hospital Part 3
4. The State Carolina State Hospital Part 4
5. The State Carolina State Hospital Part 5

Watching these, I’m especially struck by how much the history of these hospitals all followed the same trajectory: a founding with much fanfare and optimism, early success giving way to hard times and overcrowding, then reform and a long slow decline terminated by closure or radical down-sizing.

There’s a new book out by photographer Katherine Anderson featuring photographs of several former New England asylums, including the Kirkbide buildings in Danvers, Worcester, and Northampton, Massachusetts. In addition to the pictures, the book also contains an extensive history of mental illness and asylums as well as “feeble-mindedness” and the state school system. The book is called Behind the Walls – Shadows of New England’s Asylums and you can preview (and purchase) it here: Behind the Walls.

On Tuesday there was a public meeting concerning efforts to preserve the Buffalo State Hospital Kirkbride. At the meeting, the Richardson Center Corporation revealed their Historic Structures Report (available for download on their documents page). The report is a beautifully comprehensive collection of history and images of the hospital buildings, and you should definitely check it out.

I haven’t digested the whole report yet, but the part I find most interesting so far is the description of the hospital’s construction, development and eventual downsizing which begins on page 62. Included are maps of the hospital campus during different time periods, as well as photos of the buildings from over the years. Especially striking is an old photo from about 1880 of the unfinished Kirkbride (page 70). (more…)

As explained a while back in this post, it’s my goal to post pages with pictures and history of each demolished Kirkbride building that I never got a chance to visit. I’ve recently posted a few more, including Spring Grove State Hospital (Maryland), Fulton State Hospital (Missouri), Jacksonville State Hospital (Illinois), Kalamazoo State Hospital (Michigan), Winnebago State Hospital (you guessed it: Wisconsin), and Pontiac State Hospital (Michigan).

Some of the less boring facts gleaned during my research involve the asylums in Jacksonville and Fulton. At Jacksonville, in 1860 a lady named Elizabeth Packard was involuntarily committed for three years. Her husband sent her to the asylum after she began disagreeing with his religious beliefs. On her release, she separated from her husband, formed the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, and successfully petitioned the Illinois legislature to grant wives the right to a public hearing if their husbands tried to have them committed. She also wrote a few books about her asylum experience (one of which can be read online here). (more…)

There’s a new editorial piece about Bryce Hospital and the University of Alabama on TuscaloosaNews.com: Southern Lights: Surviving on the ‘Wrong’ Side of the Tracks. Instead of focusing on the present (see Bryce Hospital in the News), this article goes deep into the history of the two institutions. There are a good amount of insights into Dr Bryce’s character and how he managed things in the early days. You get a good sense of why this hospital bears Dr. Bryce’s name, and of the multifaceted nature of an asylum superintendent’s job. The superintendent not only provided care to the hospital’s patients but also acted as a chief executive, setting policy, marketing the hospital, and keeping the institution fiscally sound among other administrative/business type tasks.

I also found this old column from the September 1, 1895 edition of the New York Times: Model Home for Insane; Features of the Alabama-Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa. (Click on “View Full Article” to read the whole thing in PDF format.) It was written a year after Dr. Bryce’s death and gives a more contemporary, historical overview of life at the hospital and Dr. Bryce’s influence on it.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been adding pages for Kirkbride buildings that no longer exist. If you go to the main buildings page and scroll down to the demolished Kirkbride list, you’ll see that some locations are now linked to pages for a particular asylum. So far I’ve added content for Columbus State Hospital (OH), Elgin State Hospital (IL), Mount Pleasant State Hospital (IA), Jackson State Hospital (MS), Nevada State Hospital (MO), and Rochester State Hospital (MN). I also put up a page for Saint Joseph State Hospital (MO) since what’s left of the building is now part of an active prison and I’m not likely to get photos of the place. (more…)

I’ve added an Independence State Hospital page where you can see my photos of the Kirkbride and learn a little about its history. The photos are from a visit to Iowa I took back in 2004. As I mentioned in the Clarinda post, the quality of the pictures leaves something to be desired. I think these are even a full step down from the Clarinda photos. (The ones from Cherokee are even worse. I don’t even want to post those, but I probably will just to be as complete as possible. Watch for them in the future…)

Independence is a nice looking Kirkbride. It’s facade isn’t as dramatic as some, but it’s still a pretty impressive sight, set back from the main road, sitting at the end of a long stretch of open lawn. Its relative simplicity in design would probably have pleased Dr. Kirkbride. (more…)

Journalist Steven Hart’s thoughtful piece on Greystone Park and the Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan friendship: Behind Grey Walls.

Included is a video clip on the same topic from the Strange New Jersey guys. Footage from inside the Kirkbride supposedly reveals the room Guthrie occupied during his stay.

Old time Kirkbride Buildings forum member WSH posted a few scans today of some annual reports from the “Worcester Lunatic Hospital“. Among other things, the superintendent writes about the installation of the clock in the admin tower. Also included are old photos of one of the rotundas, Hooper Hall. They’re definitely worth checking out.

I can’t tell how old it is, but this article on the history of Saint Elizabeths on the National Museum of Civil War Medicine site is worth a look. Some of the info is pretty familiar, but this lithograph of the rear of the Kirkbride is something I’ve never seen before—and not a bad piece of work either.

It’s funny how almost every Kirkbride building has been drawn, painted, and photographed over its entire lifecycle, and that the photography done now is just a continuation of that historical record.