A Scary Sanitorium - The Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium
A Scary Sanitorium - The Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
Dear Henry,
I’ve discovered Booneville, and you will never guess what’s there.
Just outside town stands the former Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium, a place that feels suspended between public health history and quiet unease. The building in front of us was the Nyberg Building, the main hospital, which treated patients until the 1970s, when advances in antibiotics finally rendered facilities like this unnecessary.
At the height of the tuberculosis epidemic in the early twentieth century, sanatoriums were built with both hope and fear in mind. Tuberculosis, then called consumption, was widespread, deadly, and poorly understood. Fresh air, sunlight, rest, and isolation were considered the best available treatments. Facilities like this were often located in rural areas, away from cities, where patients could be separated from the general population and surrounded by open space.
The Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium opened in 1909 and expanded over time as patient numbers grew. For decades, it was both a place of healing and a place of confinement. Some patients stayed for months. Others stayed for years. Many never left at all.
We had read that the sanatorium was operating as a museum, but when we arrived, it wasn’t open. There were no posted hours and no clear information about tours, so I suspect that information is no longer current. That only added to the strangeness of the visit, a site meant to educate, now closed off, its stories locked behind stone walls.
The building itself is beautiful in a severe, institutional way, solid masonry, symmetrical lines, large windows designed to let in light and air. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and yet standing there, it was impossible not to feel unsettled. If it wasn’t haunted, it was certainly heavy with memory.
The surrounding grounds have since been repurposed for new uses, as often happens with places built for crises that eventually fade. But the main hospital remains, silent and watchful, a reminder of how much fear once accompanied something as ordinary as a cough.
Places like this always make me grateful for antibiotics, for clean water, for modern medicine, and also reflective. Entire landscapes were shaped by diseases we now rarely think about, their buildings left behind like punctuation marks in history.
This one felt like an exclamation point.
xoxo,
a.d. elliott
________________________________________________________
Dear Henry,
I’ve discovered Booneville, and you will never guess what’s there.
Just outside town stands the former Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium, a place that feels suspended between public health history and quiet unease. The building in front of us was the Nyberg Building, the main hospital, which treated patients until the 1970s, when advances in antibiotics finally rendered facilities like this unnecessary.
At the height of the tuberculosis epidemic in the early twentieth century, sanatoriums were built with both hope and fear in mind. Tuberculosis, then called consumption, was widespread, deadly, and poorly understood. Fresh air, sunlight, rest, and isolation were considered the best available treatments. Facilities like this were often located in rural areas, away from cities, where patients could be separated from the general population and surrounded by open space.
The Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium opened in 1909 and expanded over time as patient numbers grew. For decades, it was both a place of healing and a place of confinement. Some patients stayed for months. Others stayed for years. Many never left at all.
We had read that the sanatorium was operating as a museum, but when we arrived, it wasn’t open. There were no posted hours and no clear information about tours, so I suspect that information is no longer current. That only added to the strangeness of the visit, a site meant to educate, now closed off, its stories locked behind stone walls.
The building itself is beautiful in a severe, institutional way, solid masonry, symmetrical lines, large windows designed to let in light and air. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and yet standing there, it was impossible not to feel unsettled. If it wasn’t haunted, it was certainly heavy with memory.
The surrounding grounds have since been repurposed for new uses, as often happens with places built for crises that eventually fade. But the main hospital remains, silent and watchful, a reminder of how much fear once accompanied something as ordinary as a cough.
Places like this always make me grateful for antibiotics, for clean water, for modern medicine, and also reflective. Entire landscapes were shaped by diseases we now rarely think about, their buildings left behind like punctuation marks in history.
This one felt like an exclamation point.
xoxo,
a.d. elliott
________________________________________________________
About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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