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Grafton State Hospital |
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*Grafton State Hospital was built in 1901 in Worcester, Mass. In 1912 it was separated from Worcester. In 1945 the institution had grown to 1,200 acres with buildings assorted over a wide area covering three towns. The Hospital closed in 1973. It was one of the first of many institutions to close in Massachusetts. The employee’s had to find other jobs when it closed.
This is a picture of the old nurses home on the Pines side. Grafton Job Corps now use's this as the old administration building. If you look to the right you can see what use to be there before they built the new dorms. The new dorms are now to the right of the old admin building. Thank you to the Grafton News for contributing this old picture to my site.
Grafton
State Hospital was nominated as one of the 15 institutions for the State
Hospital and School system nomination.
Pines A (before renovation)
Some of the buildings have been ruined others have been renovated and changed for re-use. Such as Pines A.
Pines A (close to end of renovation)
A hidden graveyard is there on the grounds, 1041 patients are buried there with numbers on a little slab of cement that indicates the order they passed away, no name just a number.
(557)
Sad to say but most patients that went to GSH were there for decades and entire lifetimes. Back then if you had a psychiatric illness your family would disown you. They would bring them to the hospital and drop them off never to see them again. They tried other ways of trying to get your mind-set back to normal. Such as electric shock therapy, lobotomies and even LSD was used. They believed it would make them “snap out of it”. Sadly it was the cause of a lot of mistakes. Also they used large amounts of penicillin, which then would cause other problems such as over dose. Nowadays we can treat these illnesses with advances in medication and back then they didn’t have it.
Under ground tunnels where made to travel through the hospital grounds in the winter or when the whether was bad because it provided shelter for the patients to walk to where they had to go with out freezing to death. Sometimes patients would wander down into them. Then the staff would be called to “sweep the tunnels” and find any adventurous patients. The nurses took turns; it was probably an every day routine before they had shift change. You can find more photos of the tunnels in the photo section.
High secure for Males (Elms A)
Let
me give you a brief explanation to how Grafton State Hospital was set up.
There was four zones at Grafton State Hospital. The zones were named after
the type of tree's that grew wild in the area. Elms was the maximum
security ward for the male patients. Pines was the maximum security ward
for the female patients. Willows was for trusted female patients that
worked in the farm fields. Oaks was for trusted male patients that proved
themselves worthy of working hard on the farm. Willows was demolished in 1970s
but one building remains which is now used as the Business Clerical building by
Job Corps.
Year 1908: over 500 patients
Year 1912:
650 patients
Year 1916: over 800 patients
Year 1930: 1,550 patients, 328 staff
Year 1931: 1,154 patients (563 women, 591 men)
Year 1945: 1,730 patients, 250 staff with 241 vacancies
Year 1973: 641 patients
*Sources come from www.1856.org
Copyright Tazz 2004
