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Northern State Hospital: Then and Now
Northern State Hospital: Then and Now
The mental hospital housed hundreds of patients before ending operations in 1973. A look back at the facility’s rise and fall, and the campus today.
written by Lauren Kramer
Two miles outside of Sedro-Woolley, in a pocket of land off Fruitdale Road, there’s a bluff containing a massive, 1,100-acre campus that’s so eerily quiet, it feels like a scene straight out of Sleeping Beauty. Here, 100-year-old trees on grassy fields stand sentry over stately, Spanish Colonial Revival-style buildings. Half are occupied by local businesses but the remainder are derelict, with shattered windows, leaking roofs and blackberry vines that have crept insidiously over peeling paint and penetrated long-neglected interiors. Wind whistles through ghostly corridors, their doors marked with stern signs warning off trespassers. Walk the perimeter of the campus and you feel certain this is a spooky place you’d never want to visit at night. Still, there’s a bewitching beauty of this site, Northern State Hospital, which operated as a mental asylum that housed more than 2,000 patients at a time between 1912 and 1973.
Back in 1909, the governor of Washington purchased land for the hospital and tasked John Charles Olmsted, a talented, young landscape architect from Staten Island, to lay out a plan for its construction. Olmsted toured the site, inspired by its spectacular views of the Skagit Valley on one side and majestic Lyman Hill on the other. His father, Frederick, had spent the last five years of his life in a mental illness institute, and his son approached his work with intimate knowledge of mental illness and of the recuperative potential of a magnificent campus surrounded by rugged natural beauty.
He oriented the buildings to expose them to optimum sunlight and beautiful vistas, spreading them across 230 acres interspersed with pathways, greenspace and foliage. He sequestered water and gas lines in 4,000 feet of underground tunnels where they would be hidden from sight. And he chose Spanish Colonial Revival architecture to soften the institutional feel of the hospital, decorating his buildings with cupolas, red-tiled roofs, sunrooms and beautiful detailing.
Intrinsic to his design was a 700-acre farm with agricultural land and barns for swine, poultry, Hereford beef cattle, dairy cows, goats, horses and sheep. One of the founding principles of Northern State was that it be a self-sustaining institution where patients would be put to work. Engaging patients in productive activities would have many benefits, it was believed. It would promote their healing, teach them new, important skills and expedite their cure and eventual return to the outside world. At the same time, that collaborative, guided work would ensure the hospital could feed its staff and patients while supplementing the needs of Western State Hospital in Tacoma.
In 1911, Northern State was up and running, the only of its kind in the state with a working farm that produced its own meat, dairy and produce. Its patients came from eight counties with a broad array of “afflictions” that would be considered laughable by today’s standards. M. J. McGoffin, a historian and author of Under the Red Roof, a book detailing the history of Northern State, noted that half of all admissions were listed as an “unknown reason,” and that anything from a love affair to masturbation, starvation to sunstroke, and head injury to financial trouble could warrant confinement.
Scenes from the Northern State Hospital campus in 1943.
Blanche Swalling, courtesy of Mary McGoffin
By 1928, two-thirds of the 800 patients were industriously working on the hospital grounds. Some sixty patients tended the 40 acres of rolling green lawns, decorating the campus with 10,000 bulbs and 45,000 bedding plants each spring. There was a furniture shop where patients learned wood crafting and finishing skills, and blacksmith, tin and paint shops. In the sewing room, patients repaired clothing, bedding and linen, crafting new sheets, uniforms, towels and apparel for their fellow patients. And in the cannery the bountiful harvest was carefully preserved. A report from cannery staff on display at the Sedro-Woolley Museum notes, “Our cannery is running full swing. We’re happy because we’re busy at the work we enjoy.” That year’s preservation included 942 gallons of strawberry jam, 850 gallons of cherries as well as prolific canning of tomatoes, beets, squash and pumpkin.
Patient numbers had grown to 2,237 by 1954, and Northern State was a self-contained community delivering myriad services. There was a commissary where staff and patients could purchase food and a beautiful assembly hall, the Hub, where movies, church services, dances and performances took place. A beauty salon and barbering service operated on site, a newspaper was published and distributed each week and the campus had its own baseball team and even a nine-hole golf course. In the kitchen, the foodservice department prepared hundreds of thousands of meals each year, delivering monthly cakes to each ward to honor patients’ birthdays.
Scenes from the Northern State Hospital campus in 1943.
Blanche Swalling, courtesy of Mary McGoffin
Scenes from the Northern State Hospital campus in 1943.
Blanche Swalling, courtesy of Mary McGoffin
Scenes from the Northern State Hospital campus in 1943.
Blanche Swalling, courtesy of Mary McGoffin
Considered a pre-eminent teaching facility for mental health, the hospital attracted medical and nursing staff from all over the state. Joanne Griffith McInnes, 89, trained for her nursing degree on site in 1953, and a year later, when she graduated, took her first job in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. “I chose mental health because I needed the money, and with a salary of $154 per month, it was the highest-paying nursing job in the area at that time,” she said. Though she was afraid when she first drove onto the grounds, the fear didn’t last long. “The grounds were absolutely beautiful, and the hospital campus was like a small town where everything was available, from plumbing to electrical, carpentry, transportation, farming and even logging. At one time, I had seven relatives working in different departments at the hospital,” she recalled. “I made a lot of friends working there, and in my spare time I’d walk on the grounds, eat lunch in the commissary and attend dances at the Hub. It was an important time in my career.”
When she first started work at Northern State, patients were put to work as part of their treatment strategy. “The plan was, if you were a danger to yourself or others, you were in a locked-up ward, but if you were well enough, you worked. Eventually the emphasis shifted away from making patients work, unless they needed some responsibility or wanted something to do.”
Patient treatment at Northern State varied over the years according to accepted medical practices nationwide. It included confinement, sedation, insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, electric shock therapy, straightjackets, lobotomies and psychotropic drugs. McInnes assisted doctors at some of the lobotomies, which were used to try to correct severe aggression until it was determined that they weren’t effective. There was nothing sinister about those procedures, she insists.
“It was what the doctors knew at that time, and it was done with good intentions,” she said. Schizophrenic patients received insulin coma therapy, and severely depressed patients received electroconvulsive therapy—a procedure still used today. “It would make patients more accepting of treatment,” she recalled.
And it seemed like the treatments were working. Northern State claimed a cure rate of 67 percent, and its work in mental health was gaining attention. In 1958, the hospital received an achievement award from the American Psychiatric Association for “having made the most advances despite adverse conditions.”
For many families with mentally ill loved ones, Northern State was a place of refuge and hope for recovery. Barbara Ward-Thompson, 96, was a social worker in the hospital from the early 1960s, interviewing families whose loved ones were committed for personality disorders, psychoses, senile dementia or Alzheimer’s. “Those families had been through a lot of psychotic behavior by then, and I recall a sense of relief that their loved ones would get some help,” she said. Her late husband, Dr. Fred Thompson, headed the psychology department at Northern State, where he developed a program for long-term, stable male patients who were housed in exchange for steady work, Ward-Thompson said. “Many of those patients developed enough self-confidence and saved enough money to ease their way back into the community.”
When she looks back on her time at the hospital, what stands out in her memory is how well-run the institution was. “Northern State was a training site for medical residents who wanted to become psychiatrists, and it was a major employer in Sedro-Woolley. It was operated by professionals who were kind to the patients, and the nursing supervision was such that if there was any abuse of the patients, it was short lived. I enjoyed the setting, the beautiful grounds, and the people I worked with,” she said.
By 1971, the tides of change were pressing hard against the doors of Northern State, as Governor Dan Evans, determined to cut the state budget, announced plans to shutter the institution. “That hit me hard,” admitted McInnes. “It was heartbreaking because we had all this really good stuff going on. Schools were sending their students to Northern State, patient treatment was making progress and we thought we were doing a really good job.”
Letters from doctors, staff, patients and community members poured into the local newspapers, and lobbyists traveled to Olympia to protest the closure. An editorial in the Skagit Valley Herald in December 1970 described the potential closure as nothing short of a tragedy.
“Northern State Hospital must not be allowed to fall,” it stated. “At Northern State Hospital families find the help they seek from one of the best equipped, best staffed and most progressive mental hospitals in the nation. To disassemble this institution now, disperse its staff and ship away its patients would be tragic folly. In this quiet valley functions an enlightened sanctuary for the mentally disturbed, guided by a devoted and stable staff of local residents. Once torn asunder, it could not easily be put together again.”
Dr. Thompson noted that this was the only in-patient facility for the treatment of acute and chronic mental illnesses for Whatcom, San Juan, Skagit, Island and Snohomish counties, as well as the northern and eastern portions of King County. In a letter to the editor, a patient, Katie G., pleaded, “Please—don’t shove us into despair! Closing this hospital with its beautiful grounds, its dances, place to work, to worship, to live as normal as possible, to have good counselors and doctors to see regularly—would be inhuman.”
David Panek, a Whatcom County community mental health professional, wrote to the Post Intelligence in January 1971 that “mental health clinics do not and cannot provide treatment for acute psychoses, chronic psychoses or severe geriatric disturbances—the kind of patients treated at Northern. The elimination of Northern State and its nationally recognized treatment programs is a dreadfully false economy and can only result in a substantial and irreparable step backwards in psychiatric in-patient treatment in this state.”
The hospital was given a reprieve of two years to prepare for the closure, and by 1973 the last patients were shipped out and returned to their families or dropped unceremoniously at a bus stop to fend for themselves.
The once bustling, self-sustaining hospital, emptied of its robust staff and community of patients, fell into a deep slumber. “We are good at building institutions, we are not so good at taking them apart,” M.J. McGoffin noted in her book. “No one knew what to do with a 1,086-acre property designed as an asylum for the mentally ill, an idea now extinct.”
Over the years, different ideas were suggested for repurposing the site, but before any formal effort was made to preserve the historic dignity of the campus, several of the buildings were demolished. The debris, which included ornate staircases, polished handrails, maple floors and solid oak doors, was pushed to the edge of the bluff and buried, leaving vacant lots where the grand home of the superintendent and many of the wards once stood.
In 2009, McGoffin campaigned to list the site on the National Register of Historic Places, and when this occurred in 2010 it meant federal tax credits would be available to potential investors in the site. It also meant the remaining old buildings were less likely to face the axe. In 1990, the 700 acres of farmlands had been handed to Skagit County, and in 2017, the state sold 240 acres of the main campus, including the fiftysix remaining buildings, to the Port of Skagit.
More recent photos show the hospital campus since its closure.
Ron Chamberlain
More recent photos show the hospital campus since its closure.
Mary McGoffin
More recent photos show the hospital campus since its closure. (Pictured: nurses’ quarters at Trevennen Hall.)
Ron Chamberlain
More recent photos show the hospital campus since its closure. (Pictured: the Northern State Hospital farm.)
Mary McGoffin
Today the old farm site, now called the Northern State Recreational Area, has walking trails for the public. Those parts of the main campus not occupied by private business are also open to folks who want to drive, bike or walk. The unoccupied buildings, depressingly derelict, call out for attention, but the site remains exquisitely peaceful, with no noise but for the haunting bark of a crow and the wind whistling through the trees. On a clear day, the views of Lyman Hill remain as impressive as ever, and on Fruitdale road, Olmsted Park—an expansive, 14-acre park—is being built with a $500,000 grant from the Governor’s office.
The North Cascades Scenic Byway gets close to 40,000 visitors a year, but Northern State is not listed on the recommended stop-overs and few outside of Sedro-Woolley know it exists. At the hospital cemetery, a marshy piece of land adjacent to the old farm barns, the headstones have long ago sunk deep into the ground, taking with them any remaining identifying information of the thousands of patients whose lives ended on the campus.
Now rebranded as the SWIFT Center, the Port of Skagit hopes the old site of Northern State will become a hub for business that brings new jobs to Sedro-Woolley over the next fifteen years. With soaring levels of homelessness in Washington cities, and the prevalence of mental illness, one has to wonder if any of today’s social maladies were exacerbated by the closure of asylums like this one. Ward-Thompson is tormented by it to this day.
“It still makes me mad,” she said wistfully. “They closed one of the best mental health hospitals in the country. It was supposed to be a money saver, and there was supposed to be protected housing for people with mental illness. But where are they living now? On the street.”
