Some places carry a certain sense of pride in their past. Others have only shame.

A trip to the DeJarnette Sanitarium is a “must” for urban explorers and photographers of abandoned places. Normally I wouldn’t visit a place that’s been shot so many times that many Facebook pages have decreed a moratorium on the sanitorium because of DeJarnette Fatigue Syndrome. However, on March 19th I found myself up in Staunton, Virginia with my sister Terry and her husband Warren, who were researching our family roots; and the DeJarnette facility sits high upon a hill, an unavoidably visual temptation, daring anyone traveling down RT 250 and stopping at Sheetz, Burger King, or McDonalds, to not look at it. In fact when my brother in law and I went up the hill to the facility we encountered two young men from North Carolina emerging from the interior, armed with respirators and cell phones, who had traveled 200 miles to see this place; and not knowing that there was a service road up to the top of the hill, had walked through a half mile of woods. Such is the fascination with this place.

Most of this interest comes from the horrible history of this facility. Originally an extension of the Western State Hospital, in 1932 it began as a semi-private facility and was named after Dr. Joseph DeJarnette. In 1946 it separated from the hospital and became the DeJarnette Sanitorium, a private institute for the mentally ill. DeJarnette was considered a prominent psychiatrist at the time and was a very vocal and strong proponent of eugenics. The concept of eugenics was to, in simple terms, improve the genetic quality of the human race, a concept many feel Plato suggested, by applying the practice of selective breeding. This would mean excluding those considered inferior - the mentally ill, non-whites, and those with handicaps or even drug and alcohol addictions.

Eugenics was a very popular concept in the early 20th century. Margaret Sanger saw it as a way to eliminate those who were “stupid…moronic…and unfit” from society. In the Buck v. Bell decision of 1927 an 18 year old was forcibly sterilized because she was “feeble minded, immoral, and incorrigible,” and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared the sterilization statute and the imminent operation constitutional on the ground that the state had the right to protect itself against those who burdened it economically. He famously concluded, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”’

Such opinions about who this concept of eugenics should be applied to, included Presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller. “In the early 1920s DeJarnette lobbied passionately for Virginia to pass a compulsory sterilization law, preventing "mental defectives" from having children. He also testified against Carrie Buck in the famous eugenics case.” America in the early 20th century “would eventually sterilize over 60,000 Americans deemed "unfit," which were mainly Native Americans, African Americans, the "feeble-minded" (intellectually disabled), the insane, and the poor. Approximately 8,000 patients falling into these categories were sterilized in Virginia.

In 1938 DeJarnette lamented the progress of eugenics in the U.S., saying "The Germans are beating us at our own game," in reference to the Nazi eugenics movement. At the Nuremburg trials many Nazis, in defending the Final Solution would refer to the eugenics movement, Sanger and DeJarnette, as examples of other nations practicing “racial hygiene.”

While the DeJarnette Sanitorium attracts many graffiti artists, urban explorers, and photographers because of its history, it’s not a place to be glamorized. It bears a muted testimony to our shame in thinking that we can improve the human condition by treating those we deem to be less human than ourselves inhumanely.

As a photographer I have interpreted this place as a horror, not a cool place to visit. Like Auschwitz or Treblinka this is not a place to do hip Instagram selfies.

In 1975 the Sanitarium came under the control of the Commonwealth of Virginia and was renamed the DeJarnette Center for Human Development, and repurposed as a children’s hospital. The Center was relocated to a newer facility in Staunton located closer to the Western State Hospital in 1996. The DeJarnette Sanitarium has been closed and left abandoned ever since.