Maybury Sanatorium operated from 1921 to 1969 on about 850 acres in Northville Township, where the City of Detroit assembled eight farms to create a rural tuberculosis treatment center at a time when no antibiotics existed and fresh air and sunshine were considered essential to healing. Patients, including children as young as six months old, often stayed for months or years under a regimen of rest, good nutrition, controlled exercise, constant monitoring, and limited surgery. The institution grew into a self-contained community of more than 40 buildings with its own power plant, heating, water supply, laundry, pasteurization plant, fire protection, library, staff housing, school, farm, adult and children's units, and a summer camp for children, and at its peak it cared for nearly 850 patients with more than 475 employees. When it opened, tuberculosis killed nearly 100 people per 100,000 in Detroit, and through rest, surgery, and isolation that number fell to 45.5 by 1940; after effective antibiotic treatment was discovered in the late 1940s, patient numbers declined, and the last patients were transferred in August 1969. William H. Maybury, a retired real estate businessman and advocate of social reform, pressed for the creation of a tuberculosis sanatorium, was appointed to head the project, and personally supervised construction beginning in 1919, shaping the roads and building sites to fit the landscape while cutting costs through resourceful reuse of materials such as x-ray glass plates and fixtures from the Pontchartrain Hotel. Dedicated in 1922 as Spring Hills Sanatorium and renamed in 1927 for Maybury, the institution remained closely tied to him until his death from tuberculosis at the Maybury farmhouse on November 4, 1931, at age 72. In 1933, five houses were built on Beck Road with CWA funds for senior staff physicians and their families, and a large farmhouse on the property served as the residence of the medical director and superintendent before later being moved and becoming a private home.