A moral argument can be made against theft from abandoned buildings, however, this building was scheduled for demolition and I knew that this would be the last time I would get to visit this wonderful institution. Having said that, I grabbed a few documents, some pay slips and some maps and forgot about the matter untill I decided to do some spring cleaning a few days ago. I had never actually looked at any of the documents that I had taken from Danvers. Life became hectic, things got lost and Danvers slipped from my mind. That being said, I was completely shocked when I finally realized what I had found. It’s nothing terribly spectacular; some employee application sheets, some receipts and an old world map. All these bits of paper are small pieces of a larger, more interesting, historical world. Danvers has a rich, rich history and unfortunately it is all gone, replaced by condominiums.
From Wikipedia:
Danvers State Hospital, officially known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, was a psychiatric hospital located in Danvers, Massachusetts.
It was built in 1878 and opened in the spring of that year under the supervision of prominent Boston architect Nathaniel Jeremiah Bradlee, on an isolated site in rural Massachusetts. It was a multi-acre, self-contained psychiatric hospital designed and built according to the Kirkbride Plan.
While the hospital was originally established to provide residential treatment and care to the mentally ill, its functions expanded to include a training program for nurses in 1889 and a pathological research laboratory in 1895. In the 1890s, Dr. Charles Page, the superintendent, declared mechanical restraint unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness. By the 1920s the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. During the 1960s as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment, deinstutionalization, and community-based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease.
Due to budget cuts within the mental health system the hospital was closed in June 1992.
I have very clear memories of struggling to fit through a small opening between asbestos covered pipes, passing through one of the gyms where someone had made human sized dummy’s from patients clothes and hung them up from the ceiling, of the security gaurds passing by us and sharing small talk and I remember the kitchens and morgue. With these memories in mind, I present to you a gallery of found items:
Danvers Wikipedia Page
Danvers History & Gallery
Danvers History & Gallery