Bryce Hospital Cemetery

These grounds belong to Bryce Hospital, Alabama's state asylum for the mentally ill. Construction began in eighteen fifty-three, and the hospital opened in eighteen sixty-one, planned around the humane moral architecture ideas championed by the reformer Dorothea Dix. The promise of dignity did not last. By nineteen seventy, conditions inside were being compared to concentration camps, and a federal lawsuit out of Bryce set national standards for the rights of the institutionalized.

The cemeteries tell that story in silence. More than five thousand patients are buried across four burial grounds here, and roughly half lie under markers bearing only a number, their names recorded in ledger books rather than on stone. The University of Alabama bought the property in twenty ten, the last patients moved out in twenty fourteen, and part of the old asylum is now a museum of Alabama's troubled mental health history.