Harrisburg State Hospital

Pennsylvania · USA · Hospital

Pennsylvania's first state asylum admitted its first patient in 1851 and did not close until 2006, on two hundred acres outside the city.

Harrisburg State Hospital ran as an asylum for more than a hundred and fifty years. It admitted its first patient in 1851 under the name the Pennsylvania State Lunatic Hospital, and it did not close until 2006. The site covers around two hundred acres on the edge of Harrisburg, most of it inside Susquehanna Township.

There is an entrance on Cameron Street opposite the Farm Show complex and another off Elmerton Avenue, and the Capital Area Green Belt hiking and cycling trail leads in from the Edgemont side of the city.

The buildings did not empty when the hospital closed. They are still in use as offices for several state agencies, which makes this one of the few former asylums in America where people go to work every day in the wards. That is also where the reports come from. They are the accounts of civil servants and maintenance staff rather than of visitors, gathered from a building that has been continuously occupied for over a century and a half, first by patients and now by the state that committed them.

FAQ

Hvor ligger Harrisburg State Hospital?

Harrisburg State Hospital ligger i Pennsylvania, USA.