History booklet of SC’s State Hospital tells stories of people housed there

By: Skylar Laird

Outlets: South Carolina Daily Gazette

Published: March 24, 2026

Words: 1,127

Last Updated: 4 months, 1 week ago

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COLUMBIA — To outsiders, the then-called South Carolina Lunatic Asylum in the 1800s was an idyllic, tranquil place to live, with garden paths and therapeutic activities.

“No one would have supposed that they were crazy,” then-state Rep. Benjamin F. Perry wrote about the patients he saw on a visit in 1850.

To the patients, the institution’s campus along Bull Street was a place of abuse, isolation, degradation and hard labor, researchers wrote as part of …

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