A hospital that opened for 95 and closed for none

A single ward grew into a self-sufficient town

The Norwich State Hospital for the Insane opened its doors in October 1904 with 95 patients and one building. Within a year it held 151 people and had already added two more wards. The original building became administrative offices, a pattern that would repeat as the campus grew. Over the next eight years, workers raised thirteen more structures on the site above the Thames River.

The hospital was built to be self-sufficient, almost a town of its own. It had a barn, two garages, a paint shop, and a greenhouse. Physicians had their own housing. A laboratory and an employees' club went up alongside the wards. By the end of the 1930s, more than twenty buildings stood on the grounds. The hospital had also taken in a second population it was never built for: patients with tuberculosis. These patients were housed there from 1931 to 1939.

The buildings themselves carried names chosen to honor a movement, not just a place. Around 1940, each ward was renamed for a founder of American psychiatric care. Thomas Story Kirkbride gave his name to one. Dorothea Dix, the reformer who had spent her life pushing states to build asylums instead of jails for the mentally ill, gave hers to another. Later buildings honored men who had shaped the hospital's fortunes more directly. Connecticut governors Abraham Ribicoff and John Davis Lodge each had a building named for their support.

Modern treatment emptied the wards it was meant to fill

By 1960 the hospital had built its most modern building yet, the Ronald H. Kettle Center, meant to treat mental illness the way a general hospital treats a broken bone. It was the largest structure on the grounds. A research center went up beside it, meant to test new, shorter treatments in place of the old model of housing people for life.

The theory that patients could be treated fast and released home began emptying the older wards instead of filling them. By the early 1970s, only seven of the original buildings still held patients. A new law forced the hospital to review every patient's case every two years, pushing more people out. By 1979, under that pressure and threats of a labor strike, the hospital closed off still more of its own campus.

When it shut for good on October 10, 1996, only a handful of buildings were still running. The hospital had once spread across 900 acres and thirty structures. Now it had shrunk down to a few wards. Tunnels connected them below ground. Geriatric patients were housed in the last open ward. In 2009 the state sold 393 acres of the grounds to the town of Preston for one dollar. Preston had to clean up the contamination the hospital left behind.

``` The Mohegan people built their principal settlement on a bluff above the Thames, a mile south of the hospital grounds. Fort Shantok was the seat of Uncas, the sachem who led the Mohegans through wars with the Narragansetts and alliances with English colonists. In 1645 the Narragansetts laid siege to the fort. Uncas held out until an English force under Lieutenant Thomas Leffingwell broke the siege with fresh supplies. A memorial shaped like a wigwam still marks the spot, its inscription crediting Leffingwell for saving Uncas and his people.

The ground was more than a fort. It was a burial place, and it stayed one for generations after Uncas died there.

Uncas held his fort until Leffingwell broke the siege

English settlers built their town center at Preston City. It was a mile and a half from the hospital site. The deed that made it legal came from Mohegan hands. Owaneco, son of Uncas, signed a confirmatory deed conveying the land between Norwich and Stonington to English settlement. The Connecticut General Assembly used that deed to incorporate the town of Preston in 1687. The paperwork that founded the town and the land that would later hold a psychiatric hospital both trace back to the same transaction.

A Mohegan deed founded the English town of Preston

Connecticut's park commission bought Fort Shantok in 1930. They folded it into a 160-acre state park. The Mohegans did not get any real say in the sale. The tribe spent decades locked out of the ground where Uncas was buried. A federal land claims settlement finally changed things. The Mohegans paid three million dollars themselves. Then the state returned the park in 1994 and 1995. The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993, the same years the tribe was fighting to get it back.

The ground gave something back once it was returned. The soil at Fort Shantok is unusually acidic, and that acidity preserved Native American ceramics that rotted away almost everywhere else in southern New England. Archaeologists have used those surviving pots and shards to trace how local tribes moved and traded before English settlement. Over a hundred identified graves remain there, tended now by the people who buried them.

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