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The exterior of the newly transformed Blackburn Inn (Photo courtesy The Blackburn Inn)
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A building on the grounds of the inn that housed the former Western State Hospital's chapel (Photo by Susan Winiecki)
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The grounds of The Blackburn Inn (Photo by Susan Winiecki)
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The grounds of The Blackburn Inn (Photo by Susan Winiecki)
Some of the interior steps rake slightly to the left, worn by hundreds of patients who once climbed them to glimpse mountain views as part of a prescription for restoring their mental health.
The wide pine floorboards creak in some spots not yet covered by rugs.
An architect’s signature on paper remains, untouched in a cupboard above the downstairs steps.
And large, black iron locks that no longer work still hang on entrance doors.
This is what you’ll find at The Blackburn Inn in the former Western State Hospital complex that Richmond-based developers Robin Miller and Dan Gecker purchased 14 years ago from the city of Staunton. Tomorrow, the inn’s first building, with 49 comfortable yet sleek rooms, will have its grand opening, finally.
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Images of the Blackburn Inn space before its transformation (Photos courtesy Frazier Associates)
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For years, Miller and Gecker tried to get the hotel project off the ground. But after the national economy plummeted in 2008, loans were hard to come by. As were national hotel partners, who wanted to tinker with plans that the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and the National Park Service approved because the complex is on historic building registers and eligible for historic tax credits. “We decided that the independent boutique hotel route was ultimately the way to go,” said Miller on Saturday from a bistro space in what was once a hospital sun porch. Construction on the main building began a year ago. "People are tired of cookie-cutter."
Built by the state in 1828 as the Western Lunatic Asylum, the hospital got a new superintendent in 1836, Dr. Frances T. Stribling, and he worked with Thomas Jefferson’s apprentice Thomas R. Blackburn to remake the hospital to reflect his belief in “moral treatment,” meaning treating patients with kindness and sympathy and providing buildings and grounds that were conducive to wellness.
The spiral staircase to the inn's cupola (Photo by Susan Winiecki)
"This is the only known collaboration of physician and architect to construct and implement such a marriage of treatment technique and physical setting," architectural historian Bryan Green told the newspaper The Hook in 2006. That year, Green published “In Jefferson’s Shadow: The Architecture of Thomas R. Blackburn,” which was inspired by three volumes of Blackburn’s architectural documents that were acquired by the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in 1999.
Stribling, who was a very dear friend and colleague of Dorothea Dix, a crusader for compassionate care for the mentally ill, ran the hospital until his death in 1874. Stribling and other leaders in the moral treatment movement such as Thomas Story Kirkbride also were founders of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, forerunner to the American Psychiatric Association, in 1844.
The Blackburn overhaul of the hospital in that period meant taking the original boxy, brick asylum building and adding airy, wide wings where rooms with large windows were added. Bars on windows were allied with mullions. A cupola, accessed by a spiral staircase, was put in. The grounds became park-like, with paths and outbuildings. The hospital also became self-sufficient, including a dairy in which patients worked.
After Stribling died, the idea of moral treatment waned. Buildings became overcrowded, and the 1930s ushered in the era of eugenics in Virginia, during which Western State and other institutions practiced forced sterilizations. By the 1970s, the hospital complex closed and was converted into a medium-security prison that operated until 2003.
Mental hospital adaptive reuses have been occurring all over the country. These complexes often had large, impressively designed buildings and grounds that deteriorated over the years as patients were moved to newer facilities or released. In Buffalo, the Hotel Henry recently opened in the Buffalo State Asylum, designed by Henry Richardson, with grounds that were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
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A library off the lobby (Photo by Aaron Watson Photography)
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The bistro at The Blackburn Inn (Photo by Aaron Watson Photography)
Robert Kirkbride, an architect and relative of Thomas Story Kirkbride, helped establish an advocacy organization, PreservationWorks, that encourages the reuse of these asylum buildings. "Buildings didn’t commit people. People committed people," he told CityLab in 2017. "But it’s easier to blame buildings than human behavior.”
Kirkbride told CityLab that some communities assume preservation means that the hospitals will appear as if frozen in time. "That's a Disney-esque view of history that prevents our public spaces and communal identities from continuing to evolve," he says. "These buildings need to find new lives and new purposes."
On the 80 acres owned by Miller and Gecker under Village Development Associates Inc., several more buildings will become part of the Blackburn Inn complex. The next building to be converted will be the one that housed the chapel. It will include meeting rooms, banquet facilities, a spa and a fine-dining restaurant. Another building on the grounds has been converted into 19 condominiums, and another into apartments. The inn is managed by the Richmond-based Retro Hospitality Inc.
"It's a wonderful feeling to see that building restored and brought back to life," Miller says, "and all the features that Thomas Blackburn designed highlighted."
