In 1894, the Louisiana Leper Home was established at an abandoned plantation south of Baton Rouge near a town eventually known as Carville, and that November the first seven patients, transferred from a pest house in New Orleans, arrived on a coal barge towed up the Mississippi River because the laws of the day forbade passengers with quarantinable diseases from using public transportation. The old plantation eventually became a refuge for leprosy patients from all over the world, and the National Leprosy Act of 1917 required patients diagnosed with leprosy in the U.S. to be quarantined there. In its early years, Carville was more prison than hospital: families sometimes left infected relatives at the front gate because of the stigma of leprosy, and patients routinely changed their names to hide their identities. In 1921, when the U.S. Public Health Service took over the hospital from the state of Louisiana, Carville became known as U.S. Marine Hospital #66, the National Leprosarium. As the decades passed, studies at Carville brought greater understanding of leprosy, and researchers, the Daughters of Charity, and patients developed a therapy that years later became a multi-drug regimen many call a cure for leprosy, now known as Hansen's disease. As Carville evolved from leprosarium to hospital and eventually became a home for patients who lived out the balance of their lives on the grounds, it fostered an extraordinary sense of community.