Situated on the crest of Hathorne Hill with panoramic views to Boston eighteen miles to the south, the Danvers State Hospital stood on this site from 1878 until 1992. Established first as the Danvers State Lunatic Asylum as part of a nineteenth century Massachusetts health reform movement, it was intended to provide sympathetic care for people in the Commonwealth with mental illness. Construction began in 1874 on a campus that grew to more than 500 acres, including the 257 foot glacial drumlin called Hathorne Hill. The original hospital building followed the standardized asylum design and treatment ideas developed by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, removing patients from the complexities of Industrial Revolution society into specially planned buildings and landscapes meant to promote healing and recovery through calm surroundings and fresh air. Nathaniel J. Bradlee served as consulting architect and James F. Ellis as superintending architect. Danvers was a classic Kirkbride Hospital, with a central administration building flanked by eight stepped-back patient wings in the Gothic Revival style, built of Danvers red brick with gray Rockport granite trim and a slate roof. Its central core held offices, dining and kitchen facilities, and a chapel, while four wings on each side were devoted to patient care. Known as The Castle Upon the Hill, the quarter-mile-long structure rose three and a half stories and featured rich ornamentation, towers, and turrets. It opened in May 1878 for up to 450 patients, and the grounds eventually contained more than 40 major and minor buildings. On the lower land, a large farm complex raised animals and cultivated crops for in-house use, and patients were employed where possible in hospital operations, occupational therapy, common labor, and farm work. The hospital played a significant role in advancing psychiatric treatment, including some methods now considered barbarous. It was the first in Massachusetts to hire a woman doctor in 1879, the second to establish a nurses' training school in 1889 and to build a nurses' residence in 1898, and it added a pathological laboratory in 1895, a first social worker in 1902, and community outreach programs in 1912. In 1899, the Danvers Mirror called it one of the most advanced institutions of its kind in the country. Beginning in the 1930s, overcrowding and underfunding led to decline, though caretakers struggled to maintain the early asylum's humanistic values. As patient numbers surged through the mid-twentieth century, the hospital at its peak attempted to care for more than 2,600 patients. With the success of drug therapy and increasing concern for patient rights, such institutions were gradually phased out, and the last Danvers patients were reassigned in 1992. Construction from 2005 to 2007 transformed the abandoned Commonwealth property into a residential community while preserving four key elements of the original campus: the 1878 Central Administration Building with two flanking residential wings, the winding tree-lined drives, open land including fields, pastures, and woodlands, and the cemetery where hundreds of unclaimed patients were buried and which has since been rededicated with memorials. The hospital belonged to a time when the general population sought, with care and empathy, to alleviate the problems of many of its members, however imperfectly and not always successfully.
