Cresson Tuberculosis Sanatorium

In the early nineteen hundreds, tuberculosis killed more Americans than any other disease. Pennsylvania launched one of the most ambitious public health campaigns in the country to fight it, and one of the cornerstones was a state sanatorium built here in the Allegheny highlands above Cresson. Authorized in nineteen ten and opened in nineteen sixteen on land donated by Andrew Carnegie, the Cresson facility was built on the then-standard belief that mountain air at high elevation promoted lung healing, so patients spent hours outside on covered porches even in winter.

What distinguished Cresson was not just its setting but its firsts: it is said to have been among the first state tuberculosis sanatoriums to be racially integrated, to run a school of nursing, and to offer an elementary school for patients' children. Over its decades of operation, the sanatorium treated thousands of patients, and by the time it changed purpose, antibiotics had finally turned the tide against the disease that had sent them all here.