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Grim history draws to a close at Central State

 

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  • Georgia’s state seal is embedded in the once-majestic Jones Building on the Central State Hospital campus in Milledgeville. Today, most of the buildings on the expansive campus are empty. One hundred seventy years after it opened, the hospital is rapidly phasing out most of its operations, leaving behind 200 buildings, many of them decrepit and decaying. To read a richly detailed account of the history of Central State Hospital and its impact on Georgia, pick up a copy of Sunday's print AJC or read it on your tablet computer. To subscribe, visit https://ajcdelivers.com/Subscribe.php
  • Patients at Milledgeville State Hospital, later known as Central State, sit in a dayroom of the Whittle Building in the 1940s. Then the state’s only public psychiatric hospital, Milledgeville in the mid-20th century became a warehouse for thousands of patients, many of whom received little therapy or other treatment.
  • The Walker Building on the state hospital campus was built to house “convalescent males.” Many waited at least a year before seeing a doctor for the first time. Walker has been closed for several years and is now decaying, with vines engulfing its brick exterior and massive holes in its roof.
  • The state hospital -- then known as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum -- began accepting African-American patients after the Civil War. By 1870, there were 310 whites and 62 black patients, according to U.S. Census records. Segregation of the races continued well into the 20th century. This photo, from around 1895, shows a building that housed only African-American patients.
  • In the 1940s, the state hospital at Milledgeville was so crowded that beds were lined up, in the style of a military barracks, just inches apart. Within a few years, nearly 13,000 people would be housed in the hospital. The overcrowding led to numerous abuses, exposed in newspaper articles in 1959. To read a richly detailed account of the history of Central State Hospital and its impact on Georgia, pick up a copy of Sunday's print AJC or read it on your tablet computer. To subscribe, visit https://ajcdelivers.com/Subscribe.php
  • Visitors to Milledgeville State Hospital observe a small boy restrained in a metal cage in the 1940s. Historical records contain little information about the boy, the reasons he was placed in the hospital – or why he was kept in a cage.
  • The Jones Building on the Central State Hospital Campus once provided medical treatment to thousands of psychiatric patients. Officials in Milledgeville are trying to market this and other buildings at Central State as a campus for a college, a government agency or a corporation. To read a richly detailed account of the history of Central State Hospital and its impact on Georgia, pick up a copy of Sunday's print AJC or read it on your tablet computer. To subscribe, visit https://ajcdelivers.com/Subscribe.php
  • For decades, patients at the state psychiatric hospital in Milledgeville were buried on the facility's grounds, their graves marked only by a small metal stake. Groundskeepers tossed as many as 10,000 stakes into the woods in the 1960s, leaving the graves forever unmarked. In recent years, patient advocates have placed several hundred recovered markers in a memorial at the hospital's Cedar Lane Cemetery.
  • Unkempt vines and weeds crawl up the brick exterior walls of the Walker Building at Central State Hospital. New patients at the state psychiatric hospital once waited in Walker as long as a year before first seeing a doctor. Like many other buildings on the hospital campus, Walker is in serious disrepair, but economic development officials in Milledgeville hope to lure new tenants.
 

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