Picture This: Spring Grove’s Cottage for Colored Women

As Black History Month draws to a close, we turn to a photograph housed in the Catonsville Room that is telling. While it reveals that attention was being given to African-American patients in need of psychiatric care, they were relegated to a separate facility. In fact, Maryland’s state hospital system was not officially desegregated until 1963. Spring Grove fared slightly better: reintegrating its patients in 1961.

Much of the history on Spring Grove’s website was drawn from the Maryland Archives. This was the first hospital building built specifically for African-American psychiatric patients in the state of Maryland. Completed in March 1906, it was located immediately behind the Main Building in the exact spot where the Lawn Shop stands today (see map of Spring Grove Hospital Center, as it is known today). However, the purpose for which it was constructed was short lived.

In 1910, the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland (the now-closed Crownsville State Hospital) opened. After the last African-American patients were transferred there in 1913, this building became known as the “TB Cottage,” used to isolate white female patients with tuberculosis. It was razed in 1964.

According to Spring Grove’s annual report of 1906, the building housed 25 patients. The upper floor was used as sleeping quarters, and the lower floor included a sitting room (“for those who do not work”) and a dining room.           

The original hospital was located in the city of Baltimore and dates to 1797, making it the second oldest continuously operated psychiatric hospital in the country. Because of the need for expanded facilities, the present site in Catonsville was purchased in 1852.

However, the Civil War intervened—delaying construction—and it was not completed until 1872. The presence of a number of springs and spring-fed ponds at the time of the Civil War accounts for the name chosen.

The first identified reference to African-American patients at the Maryland Hospital is found in the Hospital’s Annual Report of 1842, wherein it was noted that there were seven African-American (“colored”) patients, three of whom were described as being “slaves.”

An annual report published in December 1877 (five years after the new facility opened at Spring Grove) notedthat the Maryland Hospital for the Insane at Spring Grove was treating 18 African-American patients, and by1896 it was caring for 45 African-American patients.

African-American patients were identified in the records by the notation “col” or “colored.” Several documents from the period speak to the then predominate belief that the races should be separated —although there was also evidence that therapeutic activities, such as industrial therapy, were integrated. 

Several annual reports from the end of the 19th-century indicate that African-American patients were segregated to certain (less desirable) sections of the Main Building. For example, it was noted that in 1896 an old bowling alley that was, evidently, located in the basement of the Main Building, was converted to serve as a ward for African-American patients, both male and female.

Records from the turn of the 19th-century also indicate that African-American men often lived in tents on the hospital’s grounds for as many as eight months out of the year. The tents were manufactured at Spring Grove by patients.

There was a growing awareness throughout the state of the need to provide more and better psychiatric services to Maryland’s mentally ill African-American citizens. In response, and because of the racist beliefs of the time, a new state hospital, intended exclusively for African-American patients was founded in Crownsville, in 1910. Originally known as “The Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland,” the facility was renamed “Crownsville State Hospital” in 1912.        

Crownsville’s very first patients were 16 African-American men who were transferred from Spring Grove in 1911. In 1912, most of the remaining male patients of African descent were transferred from Spring Grove to Crownsville. African-American females were transferred the following year. 

For those interested in learning more about the history of Spring Grove, the volunteer-staffed Alumni Museum is located in the Garrett Building (No. 14 on the accompanying map), open on the first and third Wednesdays of every month, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. For more information, call 410-402-7856.

Thanks go to Bryce Rumbles, librarian at the Catonsville Branch, and Lisa Vicari, Catonsville Room volunteer and board member, Friends of the Catonsville Library, for their research assistance. Anyone interested in ordering digital reprints of any of the historical images featured in this series, should contact Bryce Rumbles at brumbles@bcpl.net.