![]() ![]() Other chores assigned to patients were laundry, cooking, cleaning, and some maintenance jobs.Īs the population at the Anoka hospital swelled to over 1,300 patients in the 1940s, buildings became overcrowded and hospital staff was overwhelmed. Women were offered training in hairstyling and sewing to care for their personal needs. All the food used for meals was grown and harvested on a large farmstead staffed by patients. Staff encouraged residents to work and hold jobs as part of their therapy. The influx of patients allowed the state hospital to become self-sufficient. Ten cottages housed female patients, while male patients lived in the two wings of the original administration building. The design allowed room for fifty patients in each cottage and increased the capacity of the hospital to 900 patients.īy the 1930s, the majority of the population at the asylum was female. A tunnel system linked the complex and nearby service buildings. By 1917, ten cottages, an auditorium, and a new administration building formed around a semi-circle completed the facility. Several more cottages were added, along with farm and service buildings. Overcrowding led to the construction of another wing two years later.įurther expansion of the facility began in 1905. ![]() They arrived at the asylum on March 14, 1900, and were housed in a wing of the central administrative building. The first 100 patients transferred to Anoka were all men. ![]() Building began in June 1899, with plans designed by the state architect for the Board of Control, Clarence H. The commission chose a roughly 650-acre site along the Rum River in Anoka. A commission formed in 1895 to find a site for the first state transfer hospital for the incurably insane. Peter when planning began for the fourth. Three asylums were already operating in Rochester, Fergus Falls, and St. Overcrowding of Minnesota's mental institutions was a chronic issue around the turn of the twentieth century. It remains one of the finest examples of the cottage plan in Minnesota. The hospital was the first in Minnesota to be built according to the cottage plan to reduce the institutional feel for its chronic patients. When the fourth state hospital for the insane at Anoka opened in 1900, it became the first state transfer hospital for patients considered incurably insane. ![]()
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