07/07/2026
A History of Exclusion and Resilience: Central State Hospital, Petersburg
Virginia had established the nation's first psychiatric hospital at Williamsburg in 1773. But for nearly a century, that institution — and its counterpart, Western State Hospital in Staunton — admitted only white patients. The prevailing, horrific pseudoscience of the era held that enslaved Black people were biologically incapable of mental illness, and thus unworthy of treatment. After emancipation, that fiction could no longer be sustained. In December 1869, acting military Governor General Edward Canby designated Howard's Grove Hospital — a former Confederate facility in Richmond — as a state asylum exclusively for African Americans with mental illness.
The early decades were marked by severe overcrowding and under-resourcing, a reflection of the broader devaluation of Black lives in post-Reconstruction Virginia. In 1882, Petersburg's mayor struck a deal: the city purchased the 584-acre Mayfield plantation in Dinwiddie County for $15,000 and gifted it to the Commonwealth for a new facility. The first 373 patients transferred to the Petersburg site in 1885, and the renamed Central State Hospital became the largest psychiatric facility for Black Americans anywhere in the United States. By the 1950s, it held over 4,800 patients — with as many as 300 people crowded into a single ward.
From its founding until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Central State served only African Americans — from across the entire state of Virginia. It holds the most complete records of Black mental health patients anywhere in the United States, and in some sources, it is revered as one of the most complete accounts in the world.
The 1960s, especially after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the facility saw major upgrades, the first adolescent treatment programs, and the first alcohol abuse treatment program in the state. Generations of Black residents from Petersburg and Dinwiddie County built careers at Central State, and the institution — for all its troubled origins — became a source of community pride and identity.
