Central State Hospital named a Place in Peril

For many years the mention of Milledgeville was synonymous with Central State Hospital and mental health. Once the nation’s largest and the world’s second-largest mental health hospital, the 167-year old facility has been named one of the 10 locations on the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2010 Places in Peril list. The historic sites were selected because they are deemed valuable and need restoration work. The organization is providing ways for people in Georgia’s communities to help with that process.

The idea for Central State was started back in the 1830s by Dr. Tomlinson Fort, a popular figure in Milledgeville at the time.

“Dr. Fort did everything around here back then,” said GCSU history professor Dr. Bob Wilson. “He was well involved with banks and medicine, he served a term in Congress and he believed in the idea of a progressive institution for the mentally ill.”

In 1837, the Georgia State Legislature passed a bill with Gov. Wilson Lumpkin’s support calling for a “State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum.” The facility was built and opened in 1842 as the State Lunatic Asylum in Milledgeville, a city that was Georgia’s state capital at the time. After becoming Georgia State Sanitarium in 1898 and Milledgeville State Hospital in 1929, it became Central State Hospital in 1967.

“There was a movement that really started around that time to reform prisons and the way the mentally ill were treated,” Wilson said. “The goal was to get those with various mental issues out of the prisons where they were treated horribly and create an institution to deal with them in a much more humane way.”

Central State was under the leadership of Dr. Thomas Green from 1845 to 1879. Under Green, the hospital operated as an extended family, where Green ate with staff and patients daily and removed chain and rope restraints. In Gen. William T. Sherman’s famous Civil War “March to the Sea,” Green convinced the Union general not to burn down the facility while also asking him successfully to give some of his soldiers’ rations to the patients.

The complex currently covers 1,750 acres and remains the largest mental health hospital in Georgia. By the 1950s, Central State had reached its peak, housing around 13,000 patients.

“It was by far the biggest employer in Milledgeville at the time,” Wilson said.

Central State began to decline in the 1960s with the addition of several regional institutions as well as increased availability of medications and community mental health programs. Currently efforts are being made to restore the facility’s cemeteries, which have been featured on NBC’s “The Today Show.”

The Powell Building, named after Superintendent Theophilius Powell who served from 1879 to 1907, is the central building and is still in use. The big threats come with several vacant buildings that have been neglected. Several roofs have collapsed, which if left untreated, could lead to deterioration. As a result the buildings are structurally unstable.

Wilson said that GCSU students are currently organizing efforts in attempts to preserve the facility’s history. In addition, the old train depot contains a museum with relics from Central State.

“Central State is the longest, most enduring institution (in Milledgeville),” Wilson said. “It has a rich history that needs to be preserved and is certainly worth preserving.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 20 2009. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry