Democrat Steuart Pittman was inaugurated Monday for a second term as Anne Arundel County Executive in a ceremony on the grounds of Crownsville State Hospital, a place he called “this tainted jewel” at the geographic center of the county. His plan, he said, is to turn the crumbling institution with the grisly past into a county park and a place of healing.
“So, we are here today standing upon this ground because today, it is ours,” he told the crowd. “And today we begin that healing. We must heal from the things that divided us and move forward in partnership and with faith that our brilliant battle-tested public servants and leaders will continue to deliver for our residents in this second term.”
Opened in 1911 as the Maryland Hospital for the Negro Insane, Crownsville became a dumping ground where doctors performed grim experiments on patients and those who died without any family to claim their bodies were buried in graves marked only by numbers.
Janice Hayes Williams, the historian who has worked to identify those bodies, proclaimed “a new day.”
“In this place, the community has a stake in what we do here,” she said. “We will continue to provide hope, healing and the care that was started many, many years ago.”
In 2018, Pittman promised during his first inaugural address to “begin the process of acquiring from the state” the 500-acre hospital grounds and buildings the state had shuttered in 2004. The county already operates a food bank out of one of the buildings and there are four addiction treatment centers on the site. Last year, the state released a 20-year master plan that called for divesting three closed mental health facilities, including Crownsville.
The state Board of Public Works released the land to the county last summer. Pittman has said he wants to add hiking and jogging paths, some ball fields and “other things like you do at a park,” as well as preserve the cemetery.
Robert R. Neall, who served as Anne Arundel County Executive from 1990 to 1994, called the acquisition of the site “a local government trifecta, a land preservation project, community service expansion and an appropriate coda for an institution with a troubled history.”
The new name is Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park.
