The View From Here: Welcome to the Almshouse Edition

Can't you just imagine horse drawn carriages and early cars dropping off future inmates, patients, and residents of the Tewksbury Almshouse?

Pictured to the left is the Old Administration Building. Built in 1894, this building first accepted inmates to the Tewksbury Almshouse. The Public Health Museum notes that the name of the hospital changes over the years reflecting a change in mission as well as a change in how people were cared for. The facility was renamed Tewksbury State Hospital in 1909 and Tewksbury State Hospital and Infirmary in 1938. It has cared for paupers, pauper insane, alcoholics, and people with illnesses such as tuberculosis, smallpox, sexually transmitted illnesses, and typhoid. Currently, the facility goes by the name of Tewksbury Hospital. It provides acute and chronic hospital level of care for medical patients with Huntington's Disease, HIV/AIDS, and those in need of neurological rehabilitation. Additionally, the facility also provides psychiatric  treatment for adults over the age of 19 with serious mental illnesses that require the security of a locked unit.

Something I'm currently investigating: other institutions of the time include: State Colony for the Insane, Industrial School and Home for Crippled and Deformed Children; and North Reading State Sanatorium, and the Medfield Insane Asylum. It was a different era and the way we talked about and named conditions that people had were very different than our customs today. It seems incongruent that Tewksbury would be named a hospital while other institutions of the era were asylums and colonies for the insane. I suspect somewhere along the line some well-meaning local historians have altered the names of the institution to make it sound 'nicer'.

For more of my explorations of the Tewksbury Almshouse see here, here, and here. For more about my trips to the Medfield Asylum click here, here, here, and here. If you'd like to read about my very first trip to an asylum click here.

The View From Here: Almshouse Edition

This tower fascinates me. I'm convinced that there is a history waiting behind this shell of copper and glass. Perhaps a few scraps of paper telling a secret of a former inmate of the almshouse--or maybe some graffiti carved by a patient when this building housed an insane asylum?

As a side note, I've been somewhat obsessed by old graffiti since discovering a face drawn on a wall at Ellis Island by someone waiting to be processed for entry into the United States. By obsessed I mean I've thought about it from time to time and hope someone might point me to some historical graffiti since I'm not often wandering across it on my own.

Anyway.

I've not yet had a chance to venture into this building. Parts of it are open to the public on a limited basis for tours. This building, the old administration building of the Tewksbury Almshouse, now houses a Public Health Museum. Peeking in the windows I saw a veritable cornucopia of treasures to look at, think about, and use to illuminate how we have cared for those most in need in past eras.

For now, I'll have to settle for pictures. In the late 1890s, the Commonwealth went about building sturdier structures at the Tewksbury Almshouse. The main administration building, a Queen Anne style building, was completed in 1894.

For more images of the Almshouse check here and here. To see images of another asylum built in this same style during this era, see my blog posts about the Medfield Asylum here, here, here, and here.

The View From Here: Patients Downstairs Edition

Earlier this summer I spent a couple of days wandering around the Tewksbury Almshouse. First opened on May 1, 1854, the almshouse offered care for those in society most likely to be ignored and thrown away--paupers, insane people with no financial resources, and people who were disabled. One of the more famous residents of the Tewksbury Almshouse was Annie Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller.

This sign, near the imposing front door of the main administration building, points potential patients down to a nondescript door. While I'm processing what I saw on my trips and doing more research, I'll be posting some of the images that I took.

Check out The Field of Dreams, which is the first of the images I posted from the Almshouse.

Field Of (Broken?) Dreams

Field of Dreams, Tewksbury State Hospital