The Territorial Insane Asylum
Near Provo, Utah
In eighteen eighty-five, a building at the edge of Provo's swampland opened its doors to its first patients. It had taken years of discussion to reach this moment, a delay that reflected the territory's ambivalence about what to do with people whose minds had broken under the strains of frontier life. The site chosen for the asylum was deliberately isolated: a day's ride from Salt Lake City, eight blocks from the nearest residence, separated from Provo proper by swampland and the city dump.
The location was not an accident. It was an expression, in geography, of how mental illness was regarded: as something that should be kept at a distance from respectable society. The original intention was treatment and return to normal life.
The early years were something short of that. By the mid-twentieth century, the institution housed well over a thousand patients in a facility not built for that scale. Overcrowding, under-resourcing, and the custodial habits of an earlier era were problems the hospital shared with nearly every state psychiatric facility of the period.
The institution survived and reformed. It still operates today as the Utah State Hospital, one of the older continuously operating psychiatric facilities in the American West. The swampland around it is long drained.
The distance between the hospital and the city has been filled in by decades of suburban growth.
