Sterilize the misfits prompty: Western State - Staunton, VA
"Old Western State Hospital in Staunton stands as a tangible example of Thomas Jefferson's desire to have buildings inspire and heal the lives of the people who use them."
-The Architecture of Healing - Notes on Virginia Fall/Winter 2003
The Western Lunatic Asylum was founded in 1825 to serve Virginia's western region. It was the first satellite of America's first mental hospital, the Public Hospital in Williamsburg, whose original buildings were destroyed many years ago...
The Western Lunatic Asylum’s name was changed to Western State Hospital in 1894. It operated under the Western State name for another three-quarters of a century. In the 1970s, the Virginia Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation built a new hospital a few miles to the East and abandoned the historic old site. The property was subsequently transferred to the Virginia Department of Corrections and the campus became the Staunton Correctional Center, a medium security prison.
The Department of Corrections abandoned the complex in 2003. It is currently in the first stages of redevelopment: condos, hotel/spa and shops. You read me right, dearies - unlike many other historic asylums, Western State is not being torn down- it is being preserved and reutilized.
Ok - time for a history lesson.
“The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
Western State, home to not only those deemed insane, but also the so-called “feebleminded” or "sexual promiscuous" was pretty much a sterilization mill in the 1920s-1940s as part of its "moral therapy" regimen.
There is a building on campus called DeJarnette; it was named after Dr. Joseph DeJarnette. DeJarnette was the Director of Western State from 1905-1943. During his tenure there, DeJarnette was one of the country's leading supporters of Eugenics*. In regards to sterilization, DeJarnette wrote: Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938 in the past 20 years... The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum... The Germans are beating us at our own game. DeJarnette was such a supporter of Eugenics that he wrote (and publicly presented) a pro-Eugenics poem entitled “Mendel's Law” which includes the infamous lines, "Sterilize the misfits promptly-/ All not fit to breed".
Until recently, DeJarnette was heralded as a caring administrator and friend to the less fortunate. The state of Virginia named its children's psychiatric ward the DeJarnette Center as in memoriam for Western State's steadfast director. As noted, the former DeJarnette ward is still in existence on campus and it still bears the DeJarnette name. The children's ward, however, was separated from Western State in the 1980s and in the late 1990s, the name was changed The Commonwealth Center for Children & Adolescents.
The most beautiful packages bear the great contradictions and hold the darkest secrets.
All that aside, I have always been oddly obsessed with Western State and I am eager to see what becomes of it.
(Sidenote: Perhaps my obsession with it has something to do with one of my maternal ancestors being committed to the asylum because he thought that a devil named Jesus would jump down his chimney and force him to strip naked. The devil with the ironic name would then chase him around the homestead. Eventually his wife and neighbors tired of this spectacle and had him committed. Given this family legacy, whenever any of us would do something stupid and/or unthinking my mother would quip, "Off to Western State with you.")
[*"Experts on the eugenics movement say Virginia's (1924 sterilization) law, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, had a dramatic impact in Germany, where Adolf Hitler's 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute. The Nazis forcibly sterilized 2 million people and carried the racial purity policy a step further by murdering millions in the Holocaust... At the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, the Virginia law as cited by attorneys for accused Nazis as the precedent for the Nazi race cleansing programs." (Peter Hardin, Richmond Times Dispatch, November 26, 2000)]
VIA: various published articles by yours truly in 2004.
