The Wheatsworth Mill in Sussex County, New Jersey, was obviously designed by someone who loved castles. The structures that’ve been added onto what seems to have been a small original stone building include “fanciful medieval style architectonic features…asymmetrical windows and doors, balconies, and rounded arches,” as noted in a document about the historic significance of the nearby bridge.

F. H. Bennett, the magnate who purchased the mill in 1921, clearly loved fantasy. Just a few years after he bought the place and built the molded concrete castle, he built a Gingerbread House right next door. In the early days of highway construction New Jersey was beginning to see automobile tourists come through on nearby highway 23 and Bennett constructed an early theme park. The children’s park next door to the mill still sports nursery rhyme figurines: Humpty Dumpty still on the wall, Hansel & Gretel, a black cat arching her back over the entry to the building.

The mill itself was operated as the Wheatsworth Mill, grinding flour for the crackers of the same name, from ‘21-’31. Bennett, who also developed of Milk-Bone dog biscuits, changed the name of the company itself from the F.H. Bennett Biscuit Company to Wheatwsorth, Inc in 1927 to capitalize on the good will the name Wheatsworth had collected through it’s tasty wheat milled products. In 1928 the company opened a new milling facility in Manhattan and in 1931 the NJ mill was sold to the National Biscuit Company – Nabisco.

Flour products continued to be manufactured there until 1943 when the Plastoid Corporation bought the facility and started producing, among other things, wire and high frequency transmission cable. The factory finally closed down in 1978.

Sara A. Collins Fernandis, the first Black social worker ever employed by the Baltimore Health Department, was instrumental in organizing the Henryton Sanatorium for Colored Persons. In 1922, the Maryland legislature authorized $100,000 for its construction; the Governor signed the bill and Henryton opened the following year, in 1923. The original building seems extracted from a tropical setting – beautiful white stucco and turquoise trim, although who knows if those were its original colors.

Sadly, we know it’s not peculiar that the building opened as a hospital for “colored folks.” Maryland has a tortured history with racial issues, being, as it is, a northern state located south of the Mason-Dixon line. So many of the places I’ve photographed were at one time segregated institutions.

Nor is it unusual that a tuberculosis hospital would slip into obsolescence. The early treatment of collapsing the lung to remove the environment in which the bacteria grew – the mechanical version of chemotherapy – eventually gave way to the discovery in the 1940s and ‘50s, of new drugs that easily treated what once claimed epidemic proportions.

The 1940-41 Maryland Manual gives a relatively long summary of the disease’s progress:

     The State's program for the hospitalization of tubercular patients has been practically completed, and is expected to meet the demands of at least a number of years. The facilities are among the finest in the country, and are recognized everywhere as combining economy in operation and excellence in treatment.
     Among white people the death rate was reduced from 160.8 per 100,000 in 1917 to 62 in 1940. The colored death rate was reduced from 413.6 in 1917 to 206 in 1940 and now over one-half of the deaths from tuberculosis are among colored people, which represents about one-sixth of our population.

Although the passage certainly reveals an effort to treat and reduce tuberculosis among the African American population, the tone betrays an eerie cognitive dissonance in the discussion of the divergent populations. I assume that the death rates are being measured in the same way – X-number per 100,000. So for whites tuberculosis deaths are reduced approximately 38%. And for African Americans they’re reduced approximately 50%. Wow. A whopping 12% better reduction for the African American population. However that population’s deaths still remain a staggering 3.3 times more than the white death rate.

The eerie part is that final phrase “…among colored people, which represents about one-sixth of our population.” Like so much written in the clutches of institutional segregation it seeks some elusive rational ground. “Well,” it seems to think out loud, “they’re only a small segment of our population. It’s not like they’re actually ‘us.’”

Originally designed for about 390 patients, at its height, Henryton housed about 425 patients “in all stages of tuberculosis.” This sort of overcrowding would be a welcome respite today to all manner of overstuffed institutions: schools, prisons, hospitals. Having to accept only 10% more than your design planned for might have been the limit of acceptability in 1958. Here is another idea made obsolete by financial pressure and the concept of running all institutions on a business model valuing profitability above all else.

References (proper format to follow!)

http://www.naswfoundation.org/pioneers/f/fernandis.htm

Maryland Manual, 1940-41, Volume 159, Page 74, 74 MARYLAND MANUAL
http://aomol.net/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000167/html/am167--68.html

The sad beeping of the dying smoke alarms was a not so subtle reminder that the building hadn’t been abandoned for long. Items – mostly technology – still sporting hang tags marked “excess” told us someone had been though the building making conscious decisions about what to do with its contents. Still, much remained. A good friend who volunteers with a medical project sending supplies to Haiti and Africa is always telling me about the donations they collect. They will take anything, down to a few unused gauze pads. In the VA Hospital major equipment – dental chairs with drill equipment and lights, X-ray machines, refrigerators, exercise and therapeutic equipment – all silently awaited the dumpster. It seemed fairly clear that everything the government wanted had been removed.

Although the place was locked up pretty tight on the ground floors to prevent human intruders, the upper floors let in birds and I’m betting other animals will soon be wandering the corridors. Once windows are broken, the elements begin to have their way with everything in sight. Paint peels, bird guano collects, things start to break down. No matter how tightly a building is locked up, explorers will find a way to get in. We did. And not everyone is as gentle as we are. Kids are much more aggressive in their entry-seeking and disturb much more once they are inside. We saw evidence of their exploits throughout the building: a few toner cartridges emptied across a room leaving a thin film of jet black powder, smashed windows, piles of medical equipment in a broken jumble on the floor.

On the upper floors all window air conditioner guts had been removed leaving only the hulking shells of the old enormous AC units hanging outside the windows. Birds enjoyed easy access through these comfortable shelters. We saw more than a few dead birds who’d obviously not been able to find egress as easily.

Although the place had clearly been gone through, still much remained. Much waste, much that my friend would have happily put in a shipping container bound for a nation much poorer than we and in desperate need of anything salvageable. Furniture, a lot of it, could have been donated somewhere. Yes, it’s that unbearably ugly institutional furniture, but that very construction makes it almost indestructible. It should find a home. Instead, it seems bound for the dump. Recycling our waste takes commitment and energy and apparently these are still lacking. Instead, entropic creep takes over what we leave behind.

The Fort Howard VA Hospital opened in 1943, and closed just short of sixty years later in 2002. Fits and starts preceded the closing: public transit to the site ceased then restarted then ceased again, disputes with unions about the transition were finally resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and a final decision made to keep open one small simple building as an outpatient clinic. The beautiful area on which the hospital stands looks out to the bay and makes the most of the calming quality of water. I can imagine how healed wounded veterans must have felt as they sat out in front of the large structure and stared off over the lapping water. But the “structural deficiencies, inadequate patient privacy and lack of central air conditioning”* forced the hospital to finally shut its doors.

So here is an interesting example of the march of progress. Evolving standards of patient privacy demand new record storage methods, different room alignments, new space considerations at every level. Converting larger wards where the only thing between beds was a curtain (and sometimes not even that) to semi-private rooms and redesigning record storage all require reconceptualizing space in a way that bricks and mortar make exceedingly difficult. Older hospital design, especially when returning wounded veterans were numerous, grew from ways of caring for the sick that placed a premium on volume. Privacy was an ill-affordable luxury, barely even a concept.

Air conditioning saw the same march. In 1940, when the VA signed the deed for the Ft. Howard land, central air conditioning was still very new. (It was first developed in 1931 and went over the hump in 1969 when the majority of new homes were built with it.**) The individual air conditioners the VA eventually installed in the hospital were too cumbersome to control and, I imagine, disrupted the government’s desire to control cost, environment, and people’s desires to have their own control. As central air became the norm, people began to expect it especially of hospitals where the comfort of a controlled environment quickly came to seem a necessity. Retrofitting a central system to such an enormous building was impractical, maybe even impossible.

Changing expectations ushered this enormous institution into obsolescence.

* Ft. Howard Shifts to Outpatient Care

 ** air conditioning and refrigeration timeline