The Medfield Insane Asylum

What do you do with a former insane asylum that is no longer being used to house patients?  You could fence it off to prevent people from getting near it, or you could tear it down to make room for yet one more condo association. But if you're the really cool folks of Medfield Massachusetts, you turn the entire area into a walking park and open it up to the public.

The Medfield Insane Asylum began operating in 1896 as a way to ease overcrowding among the state's existing facilities. By 1914 it had changed its name to the politically correct Medfield State Hospital, at which point its campus style grounds consisted of over 50 buildings and was home to 1,500 patients; a number would swell to over 2,300 in later years.

Today this entire area sits abandoned and boarded, and although some of the buildings have been destroyed in recent years, on the day we went I counted at least 30 of them still standing. Medfield was a community as much as a hospital, and what's left has the creepiness of a ghost town but the pleasantness of a city park.

We passed several people along the streets that day - including a family with young kids and a pair of elderly ladies - and all were doing exactly the same thing we were; getting some exercise while at the same time enjoying this glimpse into Massachusetts' past.

Anyone who remembers the cars I drove as a youth can tell you that I find beauty in the decrepit. Put me in a place like this and I'm a big old kid in a 900 acre playground, trying to see it all in one afternoon. I probably made Tina take a dozen pictures standing by this clocktower just to make sure I’d have a least one or two that wouldn’t end up in my recycling bin.

A few of the buildings were residential houses where I believe management kept themselves separate from the population, but mostly the staff lived in the upper floors and attics of the same brick buildings patients were housed in.

For a variety of reasons - least of all the hazardous materials released by the deterioration of the buildings - the town doesn’t want people going inside any of them. In addition to boarding up all the windows, security guards regularly patrol the grounds and signs everywhere warn of all the bad stuff you’ll be inhaling should you enter. I'm also convinced they have the buildings alarmed. Why I think that, I'll never tell.

Outdoor activities were a part of life for many patients of Medfield Hospital. They farmed the hundreds of acres surrounding the hospital, providing enough food not only for the hospital but excess to ship to surrounding towns. This was important not only for the hospital to help sustain itself, but for patients to keep busy while at the same time learning to lead productive lives. It wasn't all work for them, though - playtime did exist, at least according to a fenced-in yard and basketball court toward the back of the complex.

It took me the better part of a full beer to figure out how to write these next few sentences. I didn't want to finish this post by just putting up more pictures of boarded up buildings, or by stating a bunch of random facts I'd looked up about the hospital, but I couldn't translate that into figuring out how I did want to finish it. Finally I tried looking at things from a different perspective. The day we explored here I spent most of my time running around trying to get the perfect picture, and the rest of it wondering what the buildings looked like on the inside. But did I ever stop to think about the people who actually lived here, who considered this place home? I'm sure I didn't. At best I probably offered up a few stinks to have been them type comments before moving on.

So I forced myself to think about what this place must have meant to the people housed here, especially during those early years. I'm a healthy and free individual who is able to live the life I choose. Sometimes what I choose takes me in crazy directions - such as this past weekend when I drove 80 miles in search of some obscure cave on some even more obscure mountain - but that's the beauty of being free. I can do whatever makes me happy, even if it is something that leaves my wife muttering and scratching her head. With the limited health care and rehabilitation knowledge of their time, this was a choice residents of the Medfield Hospital did not have. For some of them, even if they only wanted to go outside for some fresh air, they had to wait for someone to come along and give them permission.

Rehabilitation methods vastly improved during the years Medfield State Hospital was in operation, and in direct relation to that came more patients being re-introduced into society and less need for them to be permanently housed. The population continued dropping, and by 2003, down to less than 200 patients, the hospital closed for good.

Although a public park (and occasional movie set) for now, attempts to turn this site into a massive housing complex have come up in the past, and will come up again. One day, nothing will remain of this place thousands of patients once called home and over 800 of them died, in many instances simply because they were born in a less fortunate era than those of us today.

Links of Interest:
Visit the Medfield State Hospital