1811
Federal military presence is established on a hilltop southwest of Fort Stoddert as “Mt. Vernon Cantonment”, consisting of a series of log cabins.
1812
General Andrew Jackson uses Mt. Vernon cantonment as a rendezvous point for the federal army during the Creek Wars, occupying the site during the War of 1812.
1819
Alabama becomes the 22nd state. The only public responsibility for the mentally ill is in territorial laws that were first enacted in 1803 and revised in 1807 while Alabama was known as Mississippi territory. After a juried trial, if a person was ruled as indigent, the law provided that they be cared for in county poor houses or poor farms that were supported from the county treasury. County courts were empowered by juried trial to deem someone a “lunatic” - if so, they were appointed guardian in the same way a guardian was appointed for orphans.
1828
Congress authorizes construction of Mt. Vernon Arsenal as one of 14 arsenals to be built nationwide. It was part of the nation's first effort to create a unified defense. The arsenals were to be used to manufacture and store arms and ammunition.
1830
Construction begins at Mt. Vernon Arsenal on a main building with a turret and several surrounding buildings in a horseshoe layout.
1836
Arsenal buildings are completed, enclosed by a 12-foot-high brick wall.
1847 & 1849
The crusading Dorothea Dix comes to Alabama.
Dorothea Dix, an American advocate on behalf of the mentally ill, vigorously campaigned to secure humane treatment for them. At a time when these individuals were more often imprisoned and abused than cared for and treated, Dix became a tireless advocate for their welfare. She personally investigated the “cages, cellars, stalls, and pens” in which they were confined and reported her findings in speeches and articles, as well as in the petitions she submitted to lawmakers.
At this time Alabama made no legal provision for the criminally insane but sent them to prison along with those held mentally responsible for their crimes. No recognition of insanity as a medical problem appears in early legal procedures.
Dorothea Dix found much that needed to be done in Alabama. Although she did not live in a way that aligned with the expectations that were placed upon women in the 1800s, she seemed to play by the rules of society at least enough to accomplish her mission.
“A little past the meridian of life - tall, slender, and dignified, with a strongly marked intellectual face. She was modest as a lady of rare intelligence and merit; but in the performance of her mission, and the great good she accomplished, she exhibited masculine powers of no ordinary mold. She had a private income, or annuity, that supplied her personal wants and expenses, and was no tax upon the public.” - a male colleague of Miss Dix
Dorothea chose to stay with the Collier family during her Alabama visits. Henry Collier later became governor and publicly backed a bill to establish a hospital for the insane of Alabama during an address to the senate and house— the bill was passed by the legislature during his term in office.
1852
Alabama’s first mental hospital is established (Bryce Hospital) and mental illness is accepted as a legal problem. A physicians affidavit becomes necessary in determining the legal status of persons suffering from mental illness or disease, and this statement is required only for commitment to the hospital. Although Alabama recognized mental illness as a legal problem, its recognition of mental illness as a medical problem was yet to come.
1861
Just before Alabama secedes from the United States, Mt. Vernon Arsenal is seized by the Alabama militia by order of Governor Barry Moore and turned over to the Confederacy. At this time, the arsenal is outfitted with 17 men and their commander, Gen. J.L. Reno.
1865
The Civil War ends and the Arsenal reverts to Federal control.
1873
Mt. Vernon Arsenal is designated as barracks for the Second Regiment of the U.S. Infantry. Modifications occurred due to the change in designation of Mount Vernon Arsenal to Mount Vernon Barracks. The post maintains this designation for the duration of its military history.
1887-1894
354 Chiricahua Apache Native Americans who are designated as prisoners of war (but never charged with crimes) arrive at Mt. Vernon Barracks. The following year, another 46 Apache prisoners arrive. In this group are the leaders of the Apache insurgents, including Geronimo, Natchez (son of Cochise), and Loco.
Shelter for the Native Americans was provided by the construction of a village built outside the wall surrounding the Barracks. The prisoners were relatively free to move about during the day, but were required to be back in the village by sundown. The Apaches were often transferred to and from Mount Vernon (a number were sent to Carlisle School in Pennsylvania). A high birth rate offset an equally high death rate. The high death rate, caused by a malarial type illness, was attributed to the village's location. Therefore, it was demolished and a second village was constructed nearby. The Apache were very secretive about where they buried their dead, and it is believed that the graves of their deceased are still scattered around the property to this day.
1891
In an experiment to assimilate the Apache into white society, the army forms Company I of the 12th Infantry at Mount Vernon Barracks. Forty-seven Apaches at the post enlist and additional Native Americans are recruited from the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona and transferred to Mount Vernon. They are commanded by 1st Lieutenant (later Captain) W. W. Wotherspoon and quartered outside the Barracks near the Apache village. The relocation of the village on the grounds of the Mt. Vernon Barracks did not noticeably reduce the death rate among the Apaches. Even the Native American soldiers were affected and a dozen were buried in the National Cemetery in Mobile. It was this high death rate which won sympathy for the imprisoned Apaches and was responsible for them being transferred to Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
1894
The Apache prisoners reach Fort Sill where they remained prisoners until 1914. With the departure of the Apache, Mount Vernon Barracks is no longer needed by the military. Two weeks after the last of the Apache prisoners left, the Mount Vernon Barracks is abandoned.
1895
Mount Vernon Arsenal is decommissioned as a military post and transferred to the State of Alabama.
1895-1900
The site is unused. The United States Congress approved the transfer of the Barracks with the entire reservation of over 160 acres to the State of Alabama. However, it was not until 1900 that the General Assembly of Alabama approved the use of the facility as a mental hospital. The new hospital was to relieve Bryce Hospital of their overcrowding by establishing a mental institution specifically for Black patients.
Although the civil war had ended, all Alabama Mental health institutions relied on the unpaid labor of their patients - especially the Black patients - to operate large farms, dairies, laundry and other hard labor and chores. Local white families could even rent a patient’s labor for a daily fee. Multiple reports show evidence of the same conditions experienced during slavery, such as patients being worked from sun-up to sun-down under the threat of violence and given little rest or food. This re-routed form of slavery was labeled “occupational therapy”, and recorded terms such as “patient”, “inmate” , “laborer” are used interchangeably for asylum patients.
1900
Alabama legislature establishes “Mount Vernon Hospital for the Colored Insane”, referred to as Mount Vernon Hospital, to care for mentally ill Black patients, who are now segregated from the white patients remaining at Bryce.
Mt. Vernon Hospital begins with a state appropriation of $25,000 and, for two years, the site is modified and new buildings are constructed.
1902
The first Patients arrive at Mt. Vernon Hospital. 318 Black patients and 25 employees, including one doctor and one intern, leave Tuscaloosa by special train bound for Mount Vernon. In the early days at the hospital there was only one physician and an intern to attend a total of 372-patients. The Bryce hospital had four physicians and an intern for 1206 patients.
In his report to the Board of Trustees, Dr. James Searcy states that he finds the buildings at the Mt. Vernon Barracks dilapidated and that much of the valuable timber and movable property is destroyed. Windows, doors and security safeguards were made by the employees and patients at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa and shipped to Mount Vernon. A kitchen, laundry, and heating and lighting plant were constructed to prepare the hospital for the influx of patients. Dr. Searcy’s 1902 report also includes his anthropologically-derived views of of the Black race, expressed it as follows:
“In this part of the United States, we are much interested in the increasing insanity among the negroes. When they were first imported from Africa; as a rule, they were young and healthy adults, selected specimens of their tribes. During the two or three hundred years of their servitude, they were subjected to an environment of European civilization, much more sanitary and salutary than they had ever occupied before. The very discipline they were subjected to, more rapidly forced them to assume the language and habits of the whites, and to imitate in large part the civilization surrounding them. The selfish interests of their masters enforced sanitary, regular moral habits, and the practice of higher methods of thought, as well as regular muscle exercise, more than and better than the negroes had practiced before. ... The Africans in America came out of their servitude an inherently improved people, mentally and physically. While they were slaves, there was very little deterioration among them, and, consequently little insanity. Since then, their rapidly increasing insanity is a result and an indication that many among them are mentally degenerating.”
Another treatment Dr. Searcy used was electricity . “We have employed both the galvanic and faradic current in the treatment of acute mental disease, and have noted favorable results from the former in several cases of acute excitement, attended by general debility and loss of tone; and from the latter in neurasthenias, mild melancholias, etc., where circulation is defective.” Records have been able to prove the statistic that Black patients at Searcy Hospital received electroshock therapy twice as much as white patients at Bryce and other hospitals.
1906
Dr. James T. Searcy publicizes a mysterious epidemic plaguing his patients. His son, Dr. George H. Searcy, diagnoses the disease as Italian Pellagra, which was its first identification in the United States.
Patients begin to exhibit signs of Pellagra in the form of blisters to extremities and suicidal thoughts. The disease was believed to be caused by eating "Indian corn," (dried corn). A study of the patients determined their cases were caused by ingesting moldy cornmeal, which wasn't fed to the nurses and staff.
1917
Epidemic Pellagra brings increasing trouble to the hospitals. The disease was usually fatal, and by 1914 pellagra had been the primary cause of death for 127 out of a total of 340 deaths at the hospitals.
Over the early years at the hospital, many investigations and charges against the hospitals took place for mismanagement of staff or poor funding. Many people believed that county poor houses should go back to being responsible for its own insane people, but the rebuttal was that poor houses offered inadequate care.
1918
Just before Dr. Searcy retires as superintendent, an outside agency evaluates the hospitals along with other social agencies in the state. The evaluation was made by Hastings H.Hart of the Russell Safe Foundation from a pamphlet entitled ‘Social Problems in Alabama’
Mr. Hart wrote a detailed observation on both of Alabama’s mental hospitals, Searcy and Bryce. In part he said:
“The two hospitals for insane are doing social work of the highest quality. I have visited many insane hospitals, but I have never seen a more careful diagnosis or a better co-ordination of the medical work and the social work than is found in these two hospitals; but their equipment is painfully inadequate.... The kitchens are meagerly equipped. The wards have ancient wooden bed steads, and the furnishings are meager…
The writer has been familiar with hospitals for insane for the past thirty-five years, and has never seen an institution in which more regard was paid both to the medical and the human side of the work than at Tuscaloosa. The ideal of the hospital, as stated by Superintendent Searcy, is to 'treat every insane person as if sane, as far as possible?’
I was greatly disappointed to discover that the State is failing to make adequate provision for this splendid institution…There are no separate hospitals for the sick, no psychopathic wards and no separate wards for tuberculosis, such as are now found in all well-equipped hospitals for the insane....
There has been no adequate increase of appropriation to meet the increase of expense due to the war.”
This woefully small team, relatively uneducated, and with very limited training and supervision, was responsible for behavioral treatment and social services for about 2500 people. These patients often had severe problems and had lived impoverished and challenged lives even before becoming mentally ill. There were often from poor families who could offer little support and resources…
…It was extremely disturbing to see the differences and privileges the staff had compared with the grimy reality of the patient’s lives. A notable example was that staff members were served elaborate meals in the dining room with white tablecloths and serviced by trained patients dressed in waiters’ uniforms. Patients were fed in a primitive dining hall with a concrete floor with channels and drains. The patients were fed on large tables that were like heavy duty picnic tables and the tabletops were hinged with metal plates nailed to the tabletops. The patients were hurriedly rush through their meal of beans and rice and as soon as one group of patients was ushered out of the room the tabletop was flipped up and the plates were hosed off, uneaten food washed down the channels and drains in the floor, and the tabletop was flipped back down and the next group of patients were rushed in…
…I was told that there was a large cemetery behind the hospital…One of the staff members told me that some of the graves had been shallow and that there was a dry branch bed below the cemetery and that if you look carefully you could find human bones there.”
1919
Dr. Searcy retires and the facility is renamed “Searcy Hospital” in his honor.
Dr. W. D. Partlow, his assistant superintendent since 1908, takes over the hospitals as superintendent. Of Dr. Searcy, he said: “His faithful, loyal, unselfish service to this institution affects not only its history but is irascibly impressed upon its future by the principles of justice and right for which he stood and were carried from him by the force of his character through the officers and employees to the patients themselves.”
1963
In-house surgery is established at Searcy so patients no longer have to be sent to other facilities for procedures.
1968
Poor conditions at the hospital continue to be exposed through newspaper articles and eye-witness encounters.
A young psychologist at the time, Dr. Michael Holt had spent spent the past year working at Bryce hospital. In 1968 he was invited to visit Searcy Hospital and would later retell the startling reality of his visit:
“Although I was rather familiar with the stressful and sometimes impoverished conditions at Bryce Hospital what I found at Searcy Hospital was quite different and far worse. [Little was done] to orient or warn me about the conditions at Searcy Hospital… The drive up to the hospital was quite deceptive. There were several modest but well-kept homes on each side of the street driving up the hill to the entrance of Searcy Hospital. The lawns and yards were well manicured and the scene was peaceful and pleasant. These homes housed some of the senior staff at the hospital.
Searcy Hospital housed over 2500 Black mental patients although the hospital had initially been constructed to only have about 500 beds… The hospital had been built in the shape of a horseshoe with a brick wall around much of it. It was extremely unsettling to be in a second-floor room on the one side overlooking a somewhat pastoral scene with green trees and lawns and a street and neighborhood leading up to the hospital while on the other side was an enclosure that was dusty, dirty, unkempt and containing an overcrowded group of Black mental patients.
The nearly 2500 involuntarily committed and imprisoned souls were “treated” by only one psychiatrist who was foreign-born and trained and barely spoke English. He was assisted by two other physicians, not psychiatrists, who were also foreign-born and trained and did not speak English at all. The Psychology Department consisted of one staff member who had his Master’s degree in two other staff members with bachelor’s degrees. There were two or three bachelors level social workers.
1969
Searcy Hospital is ordered to desegregate per the 1964 Civil Rights Act. White patients are admitted at Searcy, and Black patients are admitted to Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa. This change had been long desired by advocates for the Black and mentally ill, as segregation created an environment and opportunity for abuse and violence. Desegregation provided improved conditions for Black patients as they would now be treated alongside white patients and experience better living conditions.
“We are still seeing the consequences of segregation and other racist policies in psychiatry and mental health care today. There are two major consequences, one is structural and the other is ideological. The structural consequences are that governments didn’t automatically become anti-racist, they found ways to circumvent the mandate to integrate through a “freedom of choice” rhetoric or through geographical, or “de facto” segregation. When money became available for community health services, they didn’t always ensure that that money went equally across communities or counties either, and in those places where there were not hospitals or clinics, the police became, and still are, the first responders to mental health problems. This is a serious problem that we’re seeing right now that disproportionately effects people of color. These structural problems were, and are, underpinned by ideas within psychiatric practice itself that we can call racist—the idea that Black people feel or process emotion or stress differently simply because they are “Black”. - Historian Kylie M. Smith, PhD
1970
Dr. Rowe continues to serve as director until his retirement in 1970 when Dr. Jaime E. Condom was named director. Dr Condom was responsible for the transition of the institution from a custodial facility to a full service treatment hospital. During Dr. Condom's tenure at Searcy, a new building campaign began. Terry Bartlett became the next administrator and was responsible for completing the work to have the hospital certified. During his stewardship the hospital and the Alabama Department of Mental Health made a commitment to historic preservation.
1986
The Mt. Vernon Arsental/Searcy Hospital site is added to the National Register of Historic Places.
2012
Searcy Hospital closes, as does Bryce in Tuscaloosa.
2015
The Mt. Vernon Historical Society contracts with the Alabama Department of Mental Health to use McCafferty House and Administration Building and begins cleaning and revitalizing those structures, primarily with volunteer labor.
2016
Widespread support for responsible stewardship of the site materializes. Michael W. Panhorst, coordinator of “Alabama's Places in Peril” list, researches the site and presents recommendations on how to preserve it to the state Department of Mental Health.
2024
The site is unused, and the historical buildings fall into exponential disrepair. The newer and most recently used hospital building is sealed shut, with patient medical records still inside. The cemetery behind the hospital where patients who died at Searcy Hospital were buried from 1902-1940s is no longer marked by any signs or indicators of burial grounds, and all grave markers have either been removed by the Alabama Department of Mental Health or stolen by vandals.
