Central State Hospital 

PRESERVE/scapes developed a Heritage Preservation Plan (HPP) for Central State Hospital in Dinwiddie County, Virginia.

Central State Hospital (CSH) is a 600-acre inpatient mental health facility designed in the Kirkbride plan popular in 19th-century asylums. CSH opened in 1885 as the first dedicated mental health facility for African Americans in Virginia and operated as a segregated facility until 1967. The HPP satisfies a Memorandum of Understanding with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR) and guides future decisions on funding, growth, and use within the context of the property’s historic significance.

PRESERVE/scapes served as the lead planner and architectural historian for the project. The HPP first establishes a historic context for evaluating the significance of the campus and its resources as a cultural landscape and historic district. PRESERVE/scapes documented and inventoried built and landscape resources throughout the campus and worked with a team of archaeologists to identify areas of archaeological potential. Based on archival research and site investigations, PRESERVE/scapes mapped the campus according to historic uses, time periods, and administrative groupings and synthesized this information to develop recommendations for the campus as a whole. PRESREVE/scapes also provided resource-specific treatment recommendations based on integrity and relative significance within the context of the eligible historic district. The HPP also outlines a range of preservation opportunities and treatment alternatives when physical preservation is not feasible.

To ensure that the HPP remains a dynamic tool for VDHR and DBHDS, PRESERVE/scapes created a GIS-enabled database that combines resource data and planning data, including treatment recommendations.