This large abandoned complex located just down the road from yesterday’s feature is The DeJarnette State Sanatorium, later known as The DeJarnette Center for Human Development. It was founded by the director of Western State Hospital, Joseph DeJarnette, to essentially sterilize those deemed unfit for society. This private pay facility was opened in 1932 and the Peery Building erected in 1938. The two buildings were later joined in between.
In the 1970s, it began operating as a public child and adolescent psychiatric hospital before going abandoned in 1996 when it all moved to a new facility in the same area.
It was bought around that time and is now privately owned by the Frontier Culture Museum which is located directly next to these buildings. You can’t miss these huge buildings even from Interstate 81. There has been talk of tearing them down, but nothing so far. We couldn’t believe the history these buildings held when we researched them a bit. Such sad stories of people who were drug addicts, alcoholics, and just mentally ill being forced into sterilization to control the “integrity of society”.
What a dark past.
