One of the many things I love about travel is it opens us up to the unexpected. In our day to day routines it is easy for us to ignore our surroundings or take them for granted. When we travel to new and unfamiliar places, we seem to notice more. Two weeks ago, I was able to go to the Maryland Renaissance Faire with a friend. This wasn’t particularly new. It has been a tradition for the previous four years. However, this was my first time driving in that area. Things look a lot different when you are the driver rather than the passenger. I like to think I prepared. I had directions printed going up and back to the fair. Alas, plans often go awry. We were too busy talking and I was too busy watching the road that no one was watching the road signs and we got lost. It turned out to be (as Bert in Mary Poppins would say) a fortuitous circumstance. We had to pull off the road and get out our smartphones (which, in hindsight, probably what we should have done in the first place) and figure out where we were. Luckily, we were not far from the fair and just had to take a back way in. Having thus been reassured, we set out once more, this time with automated directions.
As we approach the fairgrounds, we come upon a rather old looking complex of large buildings. They were brick, old, and looked abandoned. As a preservation major, this could not have been ignored. As we are excitingly oooh-ing and aaah-ing over them, I guess it had to have been a hospital. Sure enough, the next sign we passed declared it to have been such a place…a Special kind of hospital.
With it being the weekend before Halloween and in our excitement of exploring new things, of course our imaginations were running wild. We were off to the fair but I vowed to come back for pictures. After a lovely day at the fair, we made our way back to the hospital center (with a few more wrong turns). Being an overcast, chilly fall day added much to the atmosphere of creepiness to the place. Luckily, I was with a fellow preservationist and all around good sport who was willing to stop and take pictures of creepy old buildings with me.
And now comes the super interesting part. Being a historic preservation buff, I had to know the history behind this place. So later that night, I performed a simple Google search on the place name. I was not disappointed. The hospital opened in 1911 as the “Hospital for the Negro Insane”. It was the only sanitarium for African Americans in Maryland and most patients were transferred there from around the state. The first patients worked a willow farm and built the first buildings. The hospital, like many mental hospitals then and now, was underfunded and overcrowded. Care was substandard and patients were subjected to experimental treatments and lobotomies. Patients who died were often buried on the property, only recorded with a number, not their names. In 1963, the hospital was desegregated and modernized but remained seriously underfunded. It closed its doors in 2004, due to budget cuts and decline in patients.
Much to my delight, there has been some talk of preserving the campus. Among the suggestions is a community center with a special exhibit to honor those who lived, worked, and died at this hospital. To my knowledge, nothing has been decided but I hope that this piece of rather dark history is preserved as a lesson to future generations.
For further reading, this is the article where I got my information. Baltimore Sun
