'State' Hospital was once a sprawling, self-contained institution in Morganton

Editor’s Note: Publisher Allen VanNoppen is vacationing. In light of all the recent changes on the Broughton properties he felt a walk down memory lane was appropriate with this updated column from 2005.

A lot has changed on the 263-acre Morganton campus of Broughton Hospital, except for the monumental Avery Building, the handsome brick landmark built in 1882 and still used today.

Recent campus modifications include the new state-of-the-art psychiatric facility, and the recently-opened Murphy’s Farm Apartment complex. The area is also anchored by The North Carolina School of Science and Math, The North Carolina School for the Deaf, and Western Piedmont Community College.

Those residents and students would be astounded at the scale and scope of Broughton back in the day. It wasn’t just a hospital. It was an all-encompassing, self-sufficient ecological and economical enterprise that dominated Morganton and surrounding landscapes, from the Catawba River to the South Mountains. 

Let’s take a look back through the eyes of Morganton resident Sam Avery. 

Sam’s father, Clifton Kincaid Avery, was business manager of the hospital for about a quarter of a century until he retired in 1970. Sam spent a lot of time working on campus as a teenager.

The Avery Building, named for Clifton, is the oldest and largest historic structure on campus

Sam spent many years as a youngster on the campus. He held odd jobs, became pals with patients and staff, learned secrets of operations and history and filed away tremendous memories of the era.

A few years ago my family was vacationing at the beach with Sam and his family. During a mid-afternoon escape from the blistering heat on a shaded porch, I quizzed Sam about growing up on the Broughton campus. His recollections painted a Broughton and a Morganton much different that what we see today.

Sam remembers Morganton’s southern boundaries stopping at the railroad tracks. Beyond the train station there was no bypass, no shopping centers, no middle schools, no community colleges, few roads, fewer homes, and a lot of open land. Highway 18 was a little two-laner that meandered in the general direction of  Shelby

But there was Broughton Hospital. It was a mammoth apparatus. Sam’s recollections and state history archives describe an institution that spread out over 3,000 local acres with its farms, factories, patient wards, support buildings and staff housing.

On campus there were two cattle farms, a chicken farm and a pig farm so large it was a tourist attraction. Broughton operated food processing and canning facilities, its own water and sewer systems, electrical and steam-generation stations, greenhouses, vineyards, orchards, and an open air dump at the southeast corner (at the current intersection of Sterling and Enola streets) that was almost two acres in size and smoldered around the clock.

Broughton’s beef cattle were raised on pastures a mile or two south. Murphy’s Farm Apartments sit atop land where Broughton operated a dairy. Its sprawling chicken houses occupied land near Mull’s grocery store. And the hospital’s vegetable farm was on land that earlier was an airport and later was Quaker Meadows Golf Course.

Patients from 52 counties worked the farms and maintained the grounds. Morganton residents were accustomed to seeing trucks loaded with patients heading to and from the fields.

“Broughton was a self-sufficient community,” Sam said, settling into a rocking chair and watching the sun drop towards the ocean. “They raised their own food, processed their own food, burned their own waste, had a separate water and sewer system, had a cannery, a slaughter house and a milking center and a slop truck.”

Sam said that “the entirety,” what is now the J. Iverson Riddle Center, was one gigantic hog farm. “We used to ride out there after church to see the pigs,” he said.

“Pig farm or hog farm?” I said. 

“Depends on whether you’re a city boy or a county boy,” Sam said. 

The slop truck was a concoction that looked like a dump truck,” he said. “They’d drive it all over,  and collect all the leftovers. They’d take the slop truck to the steam generator, hook it up, cook it until it was just right and feed it to the hogs.”

“It was truly a closed ecological system,” he said.

Sam’s father and family lived in a house on campus. “We lived at 843 Shelby Road,” he said, “which is now Sterling Street, in a house that eventually became the home of Options, which called it Cliff Haven after my father.”

That the hospital came to Morganton is a tribute to the region’s people. During the 1870’s the state’s General Assembly was searching for site to build a second state mental hospital. Four cities -- Statesville, Hickory, Asheville, and Morganton -- competed for the institution. 

Morganton won. “We had some extremely astute politicians from Morganton,” Sam said, “like the Tates.”

Sam was referring to Major Samuel McDowell Tate, Civil War hero, US Postmaster, and a member of the NC House of Representatives (1874) the State Legislative (1880, 1882, 1884), Federal Bank Examiner for the Southeast (1886-1892), and NC State Treasure under Gov. Holt (1892). 

To save money, state prisoners were brought to Morganton to make Catawba River mud bricks for the hospital’s first building. It opened in 1883 as the Western North Carolina Insane Asylum.

Its first patient was a medical doctor, according to the North Carolina Division of Mental Health. Within two years 283 patients were residents on a campus designed to hold about 100. Continued legislative funding and local political wherewithal permitted enough growth for the hospital to eventually accommodate nearly 3,600 patients and encompass almost 3,000 acres.

In 1890, the hospital’s name was changed to State Hospital at Morganton. In 1959 it was renamed in honor of Gov. J. Melville Broughton. 

But to Sam, it was always, “State Hospital.” A sign bearing that name faced Shelby Road for years after being renamed Broughton. 

In the 1960’s, Sam said, “it was not an uncommon sight to see farm trucks – flat-bed trucks with slated sides -- and Broughton patients standing up dressed in khaki skivvies being driven out to the work farms,” Sam said.

Patients received two yellow cans of snuff for compensation. Sam spent a summer working in the commissary and became friends with an enterprising patient named Charlie.

Charlie would make the rounds within locked patient wards, take orders for goods and collect cans of snuff. He’d apply a little mark up for his efforts. “He would come into the commissary,” Sam said, “and he had a box that was filled to the brim with these little cans of snuff. He had a list about three pages long of everything he wanted. He was what you call a preferred customer.”

Sam’s father retired when Sam was 15 years old and the family moved across town. Five years later, while a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, Sam saw the movie, “One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest.” Its allegorical theme is set in the world modeled after Oregon State Hospital. 

The film’s set and cast of characters, Sam said, brought chills with its uncanny resemblance to the Broughton he remembered as a teenager.

“I spent at least six years of my life on (Broughton’s) campus everyday,” he said. “If you want to know what a locked ward looked like there, go see (that movie). That’s it, down to the uniforms, the characters and the five-inch keys.”

Allen VanNoppen is publisher of The Paper. He may be reached at 828-445-8595 or allen@thepaper.media.