Historic St. Elizabeths Hospital, enclosed by the fence and wall along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, opened in 1855 as the nation’s first public institution to treat mentally ill members of the armed forces and District of Columbia residents. At a time when the mentally ill were often ignored or locked away, Dorothea Lynde Dix persuaded Congress to fund the new Government Hospital for the Insane, and President Millard Fillmore appointed Dr. Charles H. Nichols to lead it. Nichols and Dix chose the site away from the city because they believed nature had curative powers. During the Civil War, the hospital treated ill and injured Union and Confederate soldiers, who favored the older property name, St. Elizabeths, which Congress officially adopted in 1916. The East Campus was added in 1869 after the government purchased Shepherd Farm to grow food for staff and patients, helping make the hospital nearly self-sufficient for almost a century. Its patient population reached nearly 8,000 in the 1940s, then declined after World War II as many patients moved to new veterans’ hospitals or residential treatment settings. The District of Columbia government provided mental health services on the West Campus from 1987 to 2004, and redevelopment began in 2011. The road beside the hospital was first Bladensburg-Piscataway Road, then Asylum Road after the hospital opened, then Nichols Avenue in 1872 for the first superintendent, and finally Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue a century later to honor the slain civil rights leader.
