What spurred the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to finally reconstruct the building?
When the project was first conceived, the idea was to rebuild the exterior of the Public Hospital and place the Foundation’s decorative arts collection on exhibit within that shell. Soon planners, architects and administrators realized that the reconstructed hospital would be far too small a building for the vast collection, and then one thing led to another. Eventually Colonial Williamsburg decided to head-on address the issue of treatment of the mentally ill during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at this site. To some, I’m sure, an exhibit on the treatment of the mentally ill in a reconstructed hospital setting seemed like a leap of faith at best and perhaps more aptly a quixotic jump into an abyss. There was no outright opposition insofar as I knew, but there were lots of skeptical smiles. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and Colonial Williamsburg took an educational chance. Remember, this was well before the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, before we knew there was an
