Baldwin County (Ga.)

In partnership with Kennesaw State University’s Department of Museums, Archives & Rare Books, the Digital Library of Georgia has just added a collection of oversized technical drawings from the Gregson and Ellis Architectural Drawings Collection that document the experiences of “living and receiving medical and mental health care in the mid-20th century segregated South,” according to Helen Thomas, the outreach archivist at Kennesaw State University Archives.

The collection, available at https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/gkj_gead, features facilities located across Baldwin, Richmond, Treutlen, Ware, and Wayne counties in Georgia. The digitized drawings will also be made available through KSU’s Scholarly Online Access Repository (SOAR) at https://soar.kennesaw.edu/handle/11360/5132.

Some images from the collection include:

Title: Treutlen County Hospital. Details of nurses station
Collection: Gregson and Ellis Architectural Drawings
https://dlg.usg.edu/record/gkj_gead_treutlen-020

Augusta State Hospital Complex. [Floor plan - first floor]
Collection: Gregson and Ellis Architectural Drawings — Title: Augusta State Hospital Complex. [Floor plan – first floor]
Collection: Gregson and Ellis Architectural Drawings
https://dlg.usg.edu/record/gkj_gead_augusta-005

Thomas, who works regularly with these materials, adds: “Architectural records demonstrate not only trends in construction and design, but also reflect the society in which the buildings exist…The materials we proposed to digitize depict public facilities, from small rural hospitals to large medical complexes, representing the medical services available to all Georgians regardless of their level of income.”

She concludes: “Since each set of drawings shows public facilities built in Georgia before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these drawings demonstrate how buildings were constructed to segregate not only by the facility but also within facilities. While some of the drawings in this collection reveal separate buildings constructed for the same purpose, but each restricted to white or African-American citizens (such as separate psychiatric buildings in the Milledgeville complex for white and African-American patients), some show how individual buildings were segregated. An example of the latter is the Augusta State Hospital, which shows separate entrances, waiting areas, restrooms, cafeterias, pharmacies, pediatric wings, and locker rooms for white and African-American patients and employees.”

Barbara Berney, Ph.D., MPH, used the Gregson and Ellis materials in her documentary Power to Heal: Medicare and the Civil Rights Revolution, and says:

“This documentary examines the history of inequality in Americans’ access to health care, and specifically how Medicare was used to desegregate thousands of hospitals across the country. As a scholar of public health and the U. S. health care system, I was inspired to produce the film by hearing eyewitness accounts from physicians, nurses, and government staffers involved in the integration effort and those who struggled to provide health services in rural areas lacking the most basic medical care. The Gregson and Ellis collection provided context for these firsthand accounts by illustrating the physical space in which these health care professionals were working…In addition to providing multiple examples of public hospitals of this era, these drawings show that the public medical facilities available to African Americans were not only separate but could also be limited in size and capabilities.”

About the Kennesaw State University Archives

The Kennesaw State University Archives is a destination for university and community members to research the history of Kennesaw State University and people and organizations in north and northwest Georgia. The mission of the KSU Archives is to identify, collect and make accessible records of enduring value to preserve institutional and community memory into the future. For more information, visit archives.kennesaw.edu.

This post is part of a series of guest contributions from our partners at HomePLACE, a project of the Georgia Public Library Service. HomePLACE works with Georgia’s public libraries and related institutions to digitize historical content for inclusion in the Digital Library of Georgia.

During the summer of 2018, Clayton State Masters of Archival Studies student Virginia Angles served as the inaugural HomePLACE Digitization Intern. Working on-site at the Mary Vinson Memorial Library, part of the Twin Lakes Library System in Milledgeville, Georgia, Virginia ushered a single item through the entire digitization process, from imaging and description through research and promotion. That item, a record book detailing the participants in a nursing training program operating at the Central State Hospital from 1910-1947, is now available in the Digital Library of Georgia. Below are her reflections after spending months working with and researching the record book.

As a Georgia HomePLACE intern I had the amazing opportunity to get to know the people of Milledgeville Georgia, explore the story of Central State Hospital (CSH), bring a new and unique piece of Central State Hospital Nursing History to light, and all the while gain hands-on experience seeing a digitization project from start to finish.

Over the summer I digitized a Milledgeville State Hospital Alumna Association Record Book newly found in the Twin Lakes Library System’s collections. This journal is handwritten and compiled by CSH nurse Rubye Cheeves and is a record of all the nursing students that graduated from the Hospital Nursing School. Amidst the huge amounts of information about the hospital’s history, very little is actually known about the nurses that served there. This book brings new context to what is already known about CSH and breathes new life into Milledgeville history.

During my research I had the opportunity to talk to many amazing people with deep family ties to Milledgeville and Central State Hospital. Many of these family roots began with the first generation of nurses moving to Milledgeville to serve the hospital. I was given many tours of the grounds, each time seeing something new and learning interesting facts. I was amazed to see many of the facilities still in use or in the process of revitalization. I was excited to see homes where the hospital staff stayed as I thought back over all of the names, addresses, and anecdotal information I had read in the record book.

The nurses and doctors lived on the hospital grounds as part of the compensation package. At the time CSH could not pay the hospital staff a competitive wage so they opted to provide housing instead. One of my tour guides even mentioned that the CSH cafeteria, currently being revitalized, was once the largest operating cafeterias in the world. It was an amazing feeling, connecting research with people and places.

As my summer project has come to a close, I have one final thing to do. My final step is to create a public event and invite everyone to come, learn, and ask questions. I decided to gather a small group of retired CSH nurses and current Georgia College and State University Nursing Professors to sit down and discuss psychiatric and medical nursing and how changing nursing practices impacted the hospital and the community. One of the panelists, Georgia College Assistant Professor of Nursing Gail Godwin, has done extensive oral history research on participants in the nursing program, publishing her findings in her February 2018 Psychiatric Nursing article, “Lessons from the Light and Dark Sides of Psychiatric Clinical Experiences.”

Above all, I hope this panel discussion helps connect the community with their history, increases understanding of psychiatric nursing, and encourages more people to ask questions about their past.

View the Record book on Central State Hospital nursing students here.

Tag: Baldwin County (Ga.)

Architectural records documenting segregated health care facilities in Baldwin, Richmond, Treutlen, Ware, and Wayne counties in Georgia now available online

What I Did on My Summer Vacation; or, Reflections on a Digitization Intern’s Experience