The Legislature authorized its establishment in 1836. The original plans for the hospital included four identical buildings, set at right angles to one another with a central courtyard. Due to a lack of funds, construction was halted after the first building was completed. This building (
Old Main) stands over high, long, and nearly in depth. The six Greek style columns that decorate the front of Old Main stand at tall and each has an diameter. The hospital filled quickly and more beds were needed, so the building was enlarged by the addition of wings on either end. The hospital's first director,
Amariah Brigham, thought that mental illness was the result of a bad environment, so the facility provided patients with spacious rooms, good nutrition, as well as physical exercise and mental stimulus. He believed in "labor as the most essential of our curative means". Accordingly, patients were encouraged to participate in outdoor tasks, such as gardening, and handicrafts, such as needlework and carpentry. Some of the asylum inmates also printed a newspaper, called
The Opal (10 volumes, 1851–1860), which contained articles, poems, and drawings produced by the patients. In 1852, Old Main's first floor stairway caught fire. Patients and staff were safely evacuated, but a firefighter and doctor were killed while trying to salvage items from the building. The entire center portion of the building was destroyed. Four days after the fire at Old Main, a barn on the asylum grounds caught fire. William Spiers, a convicted arsonist, former patient, and sporadic employee, was arrested after admitting to setting both fires because he was angry with his supervisor.
A Secret Institution (1890), a 19th-century autobiographical narrative, describes
Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop's institutionalization at the asylum for voicing suspicions that someone was trying to poison her. ==
American Journal of Insanity==