No Marker, No Memorial: The Lakin State Hospital for the Colored Insane
In Depth
There was nothing there. No marker. No memorial. The hospital had been massive, a campus. Its mission had been legendary. And now there was no trace of it at all.
The Lakin State Hospital for the Colored Insane opened in 1926 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The mental health facility was one of a series of community services proposed by African American legislators T.G. Nutter, Harry Capehart, and T.J. Coleman. The trio also established the Lakin State Industrial School for Colored Boys, a reform school for non-violent juvenile offenders, age 10 and up (previously, so-called delinquent boys had been sent by judges—or their parents—to a center which housed “inmates” as young as 6).
The main building of the Hospital for the Colored Insane was an imposing brick structure, wide and featureless: unadorned windows, skeletal columns. It looked like a prison, though the “prison” was technically across the street. Both the facilities had opened under the auspices of separate but equal treatment for African Americans.
But Lakin was special: It was purportedly one of only 2 hospitals in the country to have an all-African American staff (the other was Tuskegee US Veterans Hospital 91 in Alabama).
A small river town at the base of the Allegheny Mountains, Point Pleasant sits in the foothills of Appalachia. It’s a rural and desolate area, known for poverty. The county was then, as it is now, mostly white.
Upon Lakin’s opening, the Journal of the National Medical Association noted West Virginia “has recognized ability in the colored medical profession to manage this enterprise…[Lakin] gives an opportunity for young medical men of the race to fix themselves in this heretofore rather exclusive line of practice.”
But Lakin didn’t just provide career opportunities for African American doctors, it provided comfort and safety for patients. Everyone at Lakin, not just the doctors, but orderlies, secretaries, aides, nurses, was black. Lakin was “the only state hospital under the management of an African American Superintendent,” according to Vanessa Jackson’s Separate but Equal: The Legacy of Racially Segregated Hospitals.
Larry Moore, who worked for more than 40 years as a social worker at Lakin, described the hospital as a “serious attempt to accomplish the ‘equal’ portion of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine” without the prejudice of predominantly white-staffed hospitals.
The campus of the hospital looked flat and bare, almost treeless, a far cry from the landscaped grounds of other, mostly white institutions, like the one in my own Ohio town, just across the river: The Athens Lunatic Asylum, whose gardens were designed by a disciple of Frederick Law Olmstead, landscape architect of Central Park.
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