Central State

Left, top Anjali Shenoy | Digital Media Editor

The frightening history of Central State

Katie Futch Asst. News Editor

On Nov. 4, 1834, the general assembly convened at the Old Governor’s Mansion in Milledgeville. At this assembly, Gov. Wilson Lumpkin proposed that the state needed to assist the “the lunatics, idiots and epileptics.” “Every government possessing the means should without hesitancy provide suitable asylums for these most distressed and unfortunate of human beings, “ Lumpkin said. Three years later, the Georgia State Legislature approved the construction of a mental asylum at the edge of Milledgeville’s city limits. In December of 1842, the Georgia Lunatic Asylum admitted their first patient, Tilman Barnett. Barnett arrived on the campus chained to a horse-drawn wagon. He was a 30-year-old farmer from Bib County. His patient file described him as “a violent and destructive lunatic.” He died not even six months after his arrival; his file labeled the death as “maniacal exhaustion.” Of the first 50 patients admitted to the hospital, 29 died without leaving the campus. The causes of death were recorded as dysentery, convulsions, and general paralysis. By 1860, 283 patients inhabited the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. Until 1866, they only admitted white patients. However, after the Civil War, they were required to allow patients of different races. In 1870, over one-sixth of the patients were African American. Many of these patients had only their first name or no name in their file. One patient was referred to as “Negro Man.” Black and white patients were segregated. They lived in different buildings, received separate treatment, and were also buried in isolated cemetery plots. By 1904, the hospital had 3,000 patients. It was renamed the Georgia State Sanitarium. By the end of the year, hundreds of patients died from tuberculosis. The staff pleaded Gov. Joseph Terrell for $10,000 for a quarantine building and new water supply. In the plea written to Gov. Terrell, hospital superintendent Dr. Theophilus O. Powell wrote that caring for the mentally ill “should not be regarded as a burden, but a divine privilege.” By the early 1930s, the hospital began practicing routine electroshock therapy for patients. The doctors jokingly called this the “Georgia Power Cocktail.” They also performed lobotomies, a procedure that cuts the nerves connected to the frontal lobe to the rest of the brain. In 1937, the hospital began involuntarily sterilizing its patients. They performed these procedures on patients who were deemed mentally defective. Dr. Thomas Peacock, the hospital superintendent from 1948 to 1959, said that sterilizing patients was humanitarian and scientific. “It is protecting patients from psychotic episodes induced by pregnancy and shielding children from mental trauma by psychotic parents,” Peacock said. By the time the practice of sterilization was discontinued in 1963, the state of Georgia forced 3,300 patients to be sterilized in less than 30 years. By the 1960s, the patient population of the Milledgeville State Hospital had grown to 13,000. Each employee was assigned to care for at least 100 patients. There were only 48 certified doctors, not one of them a psychiatrist. In 1950, Peter Cranford, a doctor at the hospital, wrote that three patients died after escaping. Another patient vomited in the maximum-security cell. Hospital staff forced him to clean it up with a towel. They proceeded to demand he eat the towel; he choked and died of suffocation. These horrific events went unnoticed by the public until 1959. Jack Nelson, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, investigated the newly named Central State Hospital. Nelson discovered that some patients were hired on as “doctors.” He gained nationwide recognition for his story and ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize. This raised attention from the state of Georgia. Central State began its’ downsize to only a few hundred patients. In 2007, the AJC discovered that 136 state hospital patients died under the hands of the hospital staff. One patient died from asphyxiation after he was restrained face down on the floor. Several died due to neglect and lack of treatment. After a state-wide investigation, Central State once again downsized to a 184-bed facility. Today, only a secure facility for mentally ill criminal defendants remains open. The 2,000-acre campus is completely abandoned, except for the Powell building, where a few administrative offices remain. The cemetery has some 15,000 metal stakes with numbers that correspond to the deceased patient’s file. Today, vines have over run the once majestic Jones building, where surgery was performed oftentimes without a doctor. It is red roof, and brick stature are quickly deteriorating;

Terrell Hall Receives Preservation Award

Jaylon Brooks Staff Writer

The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation has given Terrell Hall the Excellence in Rehabilitation award at the 44th annual Preservation Awards ceremony, held on Oct. 11 in Macon. The purpose of the award is to recognize the best attempts at preserving historic buildings in Georgia. Terrell Hall was first constructed in 1908, as a women’s dormitory, to be a part of the campus of the then-named Georgia State College for Women. Originally it was dubbed Lamar Hall after Richard Lamar, Baldwin County state commissioner and a founding member of the Board of Directors.

Lamar famously didn’t approve of Marvin Parks, who was college president at the time, and Parks’ allies on the board eventually had the name of the dorm changed to Terrell Hall in 1913. This was done in memory of Joseph Terrell, who was governor of Georgia until 1907. Terrell largely remained a residence hall until the 1980s when the history department moved in, and the building began to be used academically. Over time, some of the mass communication and foreign language departments would end up calling the building home. By 2006, Terrell was no longer being used as a dorm, and was completely dedicated to office space. Renovations on Terrell officially began in January of 2017, with the ribbon-cutting event taking place in February of 2020. Prior to the renovations, while most of the programs residing in Terrell Hall were from the Mass Communication department, many of their offices, classrooms, and organizations were scattered across campus. “Students that were doing television production would have to go to the fourth floor of Atkinson, which we were sharing with the university communications department,” said Angela Criscoe, interim executive director in the school of continuing and professional studies. It was because of this that former President Dorman and Provost Brown made the decision to dedicate the renovated Terrell Hall to the mass communications department.

During construction, those in the department were moved into Beeson Hall, though various professors were allowed to work with the architects to give input on specific changes they wanted to make. “I told our department chair at the time that I knew a little about construction and would love to play a role in what the building would look like,” said Criscoe. Criscoe acted as an associate professor in the mass communications department until this past summer and was privy to many of the renovations made to Terrell Hall. After the renovations, Terrell Hall contained a variety of cutting-edge technology for the use of students, totaling $13.3 million.

Another key focus of the renovations was restoring some of the building’s more historic aspects. This would include wider hallways, stripping off almost 30 coats of paint to restore the old wood flooring, higher ceilings and uncovering windows. “Terrell Hall’s architecture has remained largely unchanged, and it’s the best preserved of the early campus buildings,” said Robert Wilson III, Professor Emeritus of history and university historian. During the 1970s, many of these older features were obscured as part of a movement made to modernize the building. Many much-needed modern features were added to the building, such as a central air-conditioning system and an elevator. “There was a boiler in the basement that we used for heat, and once they turned that on, they didn’t turn it off again until the spring,” said Amanda Respess, senior lecturer in the mass communication department. “And you know how Georgia goes up and down with our temperatures.” A great deal of work was put into Terrell Hall not just to ensure that it could cater to each and every need of mass communication students, but to also give them a glimpse into where it all started. “In the department of communications, we teach our students how to communicate properly to the public and placing us in a forward-facing building on front campus is a message to the community that this is who we are,” said Criscoe.

Olivia Ettinger | Contributing Photograher