Mt Vernon Arsenal / Searcy Hospital

Описание: Our recent visit to the Mt. Vernon Arsenal and Searcy Hospital Grounds. Located in Mt. Vernon Alabama. It was a wonderful spent flying among old and new friends.
The Mount Vernon Arsenal was established by the United States Army near the Mobile River, three miles west of Fort Stoddert, and approximately 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. Along with the Kennebec Arsenal in Augusta, Maine, it is one of the most complete antebellum arsenals surviving to the present day. Established in 1828 as an ordnance manufacturing base, the Mount Vernon Arsenal served as one of the U.S. Army's main ammunition plants from its inception until the Civil War.
On January 4, 1861, troops of the Alabama state militia took possession of the arsenal on the orders of Alabama governor Andrew B. Moore.[3] The takeover from the small US Army force, commanded by Captain Jesse L. Reno, was peaceful and bloodless. After Alabama joined with other seceded states to form the Confederacy, the Arsenal was turned over to the Confederate Army for the duration of the war. In 1862, after the Battle of New Orleans, the Confederacy moved ammunition manufacturing from the Mount Vernon Arsenal to Selma, Alabama. Selma offered a more secure location farther away from Union forces.
The Confederate Army held the Arsenal almost until the end of the Civil War. After the war was over, the Arsenal was returned to the federal government and the site was renamed the Mount Vernon Barracks. From 1887 to 1894 the Barracks was used as a prison for captured Apache people, including Geronimo and his followers. Walter Reed, the United States Army physician who confirmed that yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes, served as post surgeon in the 1880s. In 1895, the site was deeded to the state of Alabama.
Gifted to the State of Alabama in 1895, in 1900, the Alabama Legislature established a mental health facility on the former site of the Mount Vernon Arsenal to relieve overcrowding at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa. The new facility was named the Mount Vernon Insane Hospital upon its opening in 1902 but was renamed Searcy Hospital in 1919, in honor of Dr. J. T. Searcy, the first superintendent. It was initially known as the Mount Vernon Insane Hospital, the hospital for colored insane or the Mount Vernon Hospital for the Colored Insane, since it served African-Americans exclusively until 1969, when it was desegregated following the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1906, 57 patients died due to an outbreak of a disease at the hospital. Initially the disease was a mystery, but it was later identified as one of the first major outbreaks of pellagra in the United States. The cause of pellagra was a mystery at the time, but one of the key observations was that it only struck the patients, not the staff. Joseph Goldberger later identified the cause of pellagra as a vitamin deficiency. It was caused by a poor, corn-based, diet at the hospital that was deficient in niacin.
In 2010 Searcy Hospital had approximately 400 extended-care beds and a 124-bed intermediate care unit for patients with severe mental illness. Patients were housed in modern buildings. It also served the female forensic in-patient psychiatric center for the southern one-third of Alabama.[6] It was announced on February 15, 2012 that the Alabama Department of Mental Health would close Searcy and all but two of its other state-run mental health facilities in a move to transition all but its forensic and geriatric patients to community-based treatment. All admissions to Searcy were stopped in September, with the entire facility closing on October 31, 2012.
Today it sits forlorn and abandoned, with many of the structures well beyond repair. This IS PRIVATE PROPERTY and visiting is not recommended.