Public gathers to learn about, remember Northern State Hospital
Nestled against the foothills at the edge of Sedro-Woolley sits a large campus with old, large, red-roofed buildings. Most of them remain boarded up, behind fences, windows broken out. Despite this, the grounds attract attention and appreciation.
“It’s so beautiful — the trees, the architecture — it’s super cool,” said Angelique LeHuquet of Everett.
Stories about this place beckon people to visit here: the former Northern State Hospital.
Contrast and tensions pulse here. The setting is beautiful. The buildings and grounds were planned and developed by the famed Olmsted Brothers architects with a Spanish Colonial Revival theme. Enough of their former grandeur remains to spark imagination. Past staff and their families recall a sense of community and dedicated professionals.
Yet the awareness of the suffering patients experienced because of mental illness, as well as some of the treatments, is inescapable. All who attended the third annual Public History Day on July 27 encountered this friction.
Public history day event
More than 500 people gathered to listen to stories about Northern State’s history and share some of their own. This event was sponsored by the Skagit County Historical Museum, Sedro-Woolley Museum and Port of Skagit. This year’s attendance topped previous records.
“It just continues to grow, continues to have more interest,” said Jo Wolfe, director of Skagit County Historical Museum.
For the first time, tours were offered inside Colman Hall, allowing a rare glimpse of any building’s interior, including both original features and renovated ones that furnished a sense of the type of facility it once was. Small groups toured the building every hour, while larger groups gathered beneath tents during a sunny day to listen to several speakers, each with firsthand expertise about the former psychiatric care facility.
A thumbnail history
The fascinating story of Northern State began in 1909 when the legislature authorized an agricultural extension of Western State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley. In the following years, patients arrived to help clear the area for farming and construction. By 1912, the first building was completed. Northern State Hospital was officially named in 1915.
It grew and evolved over the decades, housing 2,100 patients at its height. At one point, the patient-doctor ratio was about 200:1, according to writer and historian Amy Muia, who served as master of ceremonies of the event.
Work therapy was always common. Shock therapy also occurred, along with lobotomies for a short time. Psychiatric medications became more prominent by the 1960s and seemed promising.
Meanwhile, state budgets and public support for large institutions shrunk. A community care model was touted as a replacement. Northern State Hospital closed in 1973. Some patients transferred to other care facilities; others shipped to Seattle where they often found themselves without homes or adequate care.
Memories of Northern State
The local community felt a lot of pride in Northern State, according to Mari Densmore, archivist at the Skagit County Historical Museum.
“This was such a big part of our Skagit story. People were not only patients here, but they worked here and they had relatives here and they remembered all the social events here,” Densmore said. “It wasn’t just a place for treatment. It was a much bigger story than that.”
This event helps keep that larger story alive. “No matter how much people think they remember, they forget unless there is a steady resource like a community event or easy access to information,” Densmore said.
Speakers shared stories that provided just that community resource to preserve the collective memory.
One, Kris Goodan, lived on the grounds from 1950 to 1960 as the daughter of then-superintendent, Dr. Charles Jones.
“It was a charmed life, and it was absolutely lovely,” said Goodan. “The state hospital was a real community.”
Goodan lived there from age 5 to 15 and recalled it as “just magical.” She shared many stories about horseback riding, going to movies, entertaining parties and patients working in the home. Some of those patients her family kept in contact with years later after her family left Northern State. Goodan long associated Northern State as her home.
While Goodan’s association with the hospital lasted a decade, Ginny Darvill’s lasted only three months as a student nurse doing a psychiatric rotation in 1963.
Darvill recalled that period being on the cusp of change in care practices.
One of the assignments given to Darvill’s nursing cohort was to socialize with patients who had been on Thorazine for a long time. Some of the patients no longer spoke or moved.
The hospital work included good intentions.
“Let’s take care of people. Let’s put them in a place where they can be safe,” said Darvill. “But then the effect of the early drugs also had a dampening effect on what they were able to do, how they were able to experience life.”
Socializing with individual patients was a way to help, so went the theory — and the patient Darvill was assigned to spoke for the first time before she left — but Darvil felt many patients “were being warehoused.”
Darvill also prepared patients for electroshock. “That was a really difficult experience for us,” she said.
After witnessing the procedure and seeing patients in the aftermath dizzy, disoriented, and in a fog, Darvill said, “It didn’t look like therapy, but it was the cutting edge and it was helpful to some people. It had its benefits, but it was also a very difficult thing for all of us to deal with at the time.”
Public interest
Angelique and Jason LeHuquet had driven by Northern State many times, and the backstory of it intrigued them.
Last year, they attended the Public History Day and donated a chair that Jason had acquired that originally came from one of the wards. They are also part of the private Facebook group, Friends of Northern State Hospital.
They both “love old stories,” said Angelique. But the place has current relevance too. It is important to teach kids about these kinds of institutions, since they no longer are built, she said.
“Daily, I see people who could benefit from a place like this,” said Jason. “So much was accomplished. Government looked out for people a little more.”
Steve Metzger of Mount Vernon has also attended this event for the last two years. “It’s a fascination,” he said.
“History is so important,” Metzger said; memories should be preserved and shared with family, so they will not forget.
One reason the public does not know much about Northern State, Metzger thought, is because it is hidden away, “dancing around the shadows,” he said. Those shadows symbolized both the physical location and the activities happening beneath the red roofs.
The hospital’s existence and its closure represented imperfect situations, because mental illness continues. “It is sad. We see it everyday,” Metzger said.
The day put Metzger in a reflective mood.
“Wherever there are people gathered together to help people, there is hope. There was a lot of hope here,” said Metzger. “Hope is a foundation of what it’s all about.”
Ensuring a historical legacy and future
“The original purpose for this event was we realized how little we had in our collection and how little the Sedro-Woolley Museum had in our archives, in our collections,” said Wolfe.
For the first two years of this event, they gathered oral histories, scanned documents and collected donated artifacts, in addition to the informative speakers.
Public interest has grown because so much mystery surrounds Northern State, said Wolfe “A lot of mystery, a lot of misinformation about the paranormal and about what’s happening with the buildings.” More positive education helps maintain the interest.
Northern State remains relevant, too, for relatives of former patients. “I think for people who had relatives who were here, it’s getting more information and real stories about their roots, if you will, and filling in the blanks,” said Wolfe. Families are “starting to tell these stories and then they’re picking up the thread and learning more and finding more about their relatives.”
One of the speakers, Carrie Davidson, was featured in a Seattle Times documentary, “Finding Lillian,” last year. It traced her efforts to track down her great-grandmother, who was a patient. Her advice for other searching: “Don’t give up. It’s so worth it.”
Meanwhile, the Port of Skagit builds toward a future. It took over 210 acres in 2018 and rebranded it as the SWIFT Center (Sedro-Woolley Innovation for Tomorrow). They have reopened the campus to public access, repaired some buildings, initiated a variety of environmental cleanups and are seeking partners to help revitalize the site.
A feasibility study estimated that to restore six of the historic buildings would cost $79 million. But with tax breaks available, that cost is less than demolition.
“The future is bright, for sure,” said Linda Tyler, communications director for the port.
A bright future would add another complex layer to the history of Northern State Hospital.
— By Adam M. Sowards