The United States offers no shortage of landscapes with “troubled” histories, from former plantations to penitentiaries. But if it would be a waste to destroy them all, we can hardly make them all into museums. And so, somewhere in between is what planners, investors, historians, and architects call adaptive reuse: giving a new purpose to an old building while preserving something of its history or character. Historic preservation was once driven by a quest for permanence—think of stodgy old house museums, frozen in time—but it is now, also, a tool of economic development. Adaptive reuse is also, simply, real estate development.
Yet while it’s one thing to put a post office in an old bank, it’s quite another to host wine-tastings in an asylum, a prison, a graveyard. And so, at Western State, the developers emphasize the architectural pedigree of key structures, laying a forceful claim to the site’s very earliest history, an optimistic time for psychiatric medicine when the cemetery was less crowded. Physicians believed that idyllic surroundings could soothe troubled minds, and the mountains of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley offered natural beauty that complimented a philosophy of architectural design.
The Blackburn Inn, for example, is named after architect Thomas Blackburn, a protégée of Thomas Jefferson, who in the early 19th century worked closely with superintendent Dr. Francis Stribling to design a hospital core that patients would find comforting and pleasant. According to architectural historian Bryan Green, Western State is “the only known collaboration of physician and architect to construct and implement such a marriage of treatment technique and physical setting.” Their partnership of Blackburn and Stribling occurred during a moral period in what we now call “psychiatric medicine”: because Stribling believed a goal of treatment was to return patients to society, he regarded them while under care as friends and brothers.
“We treat them as human beings deserving of attention and care, rather than criminals and outlaws, meriting not even our compassion,” he wrote in the hospital’s 1837 annual report. Blackburn, learning from Jefferson, believed that the design of buildings could change human behavior for the better. One of the developer’s favorite anecdotes about the site is from Stribling period: “The hospital was built in a pastoral setting to help the healing process for the mentally troubled,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “The site was so beautiful that a fence surrounding the property was not meant to keep residents in, but to keep townspeople from going on picnics on the campus, or so the legend goes.”
This legend happens to be true; as a historian, I will do them a solid and confirm that Stribling took out a notice to the public in 1848 warning off recreation-seeking on the grounds. By 1853, construction had begun on an iron fence around the campus. It’s a historical detail that easily collapses past and present. The site is beautifully restored, including the fence. But, with the average per-capita income for Staunton at $19,000 and property prices set to lure affluent investors, a fence is no longer needed to keep most locals at bay.