Manteno State Hospital

Manteno, Illinois, is a farm-belt village of a few thousand people, but for most of the twentieth century it was home to one of the largest psychiatric institutions in the United States. Manteno State Hospital opened in December of nineteen thirty with one hundred patients transferred from the overcrowded Kankakee facility down the road. Within six years it covered twelve hundred acres, with its own power plant, fire department, working farm, and police force, a city within a city sustained by patient labor.

By nineteen fifty-four the population peaked at more than eight thousand residents. A nineteen thirty-nine typhoid outbreak killed about thirty-seven patients and staff when contaminated water spread through the self-contained water system. The hospital closed on December thirty-first, nineteen eighty-five.

The grounds were later redeveloped as a veterans' home and industrial park, the buildings that once held thousands now quietly repurposed.