More than 100 Tour Campus of Medfield State Hospital

More than 100 Medfield residents took part in a recent exterior tour of the Medfield State Hospital campus, led by Richard DeSorgher, town historian and selectman, and Michael Taylor, chairman of the Medfield Historic District Commission.

Some of the points made during the 90-minute tour:

• The hospital opened in 1896, designed for 1,000 residents. Within 10 years, it had 1,500 people living in its buildings. The hospital by the 20s and 30s, then known as the Medfield Insane Asylum, had more people than the town of Medfield itself.
• The campus is laid out in a symmetrical pattern. The residential buildings all have duplicates, but the buildings are positioned differently. The left side of the campus was designated for men; the right side, for women.
• Up until 1918, anyone who died at the hospital was buried in Medfield. But that year, the great influenza epidemic killed 17 people in one month in Medfield, and 55 people at the hospital. After that, the hospital had its own cemetery.
• DeSorgher said the ties between hospital and town were always strong. When he was a child, Medfield Little League games were played on a portion of the hospital property, now occupied by a vocational building. Town residents also came to the hospital for dances and movie screenings.
• Children lived at the hospital, as well as adults. The youngest children were 4, said DeSorgher, and were not segregated from adults in the residential buildings. One of the buildings served as a school.
• The St. Jude's Chapel building, at the center of the campus, like many of the buildings, has a slate roof and copper toppings that have remained intact. 
• A historic district for Medfield State Hospital was created in 1994, nine years before the facility closed.
• The buildings have not been evaluated for about 10 years. The Medfield Historic District Commission plans to evaluate three buildings to determine how much their status has changed.
• Medfield is now negotiating how the town could acquire the property from the state. 
• In 1998, the state, which then did not want to sell to the town, entertained a development proposal that would create 374 housing units on the site, by tearing down three of the buildings and rehabbing the remainder. This development plan, as well as others in subsequent years, was dropped.