Embreeville State Hospital - The Chester County Poorhouse

If you park in the dirt lot of the ChesLen Nature Preserve in Coatesville, PA, and make your way across the road, over a stonework bridge, and through some rolling pastures, you will, in time, find yourself at a potters field. Rows of numbered stones in a patch of grass. These nameless dead are all that remain of the Chester County Poorhouse and Embreeville State Hospital. Mute storytellers who, in death, have outlived the old hospital they once called home.

Off, across the vale and up a ridge from these numbered gravestones once stood the Embreeville State Hospital, though this was just the name it held in recent decades. In the 1790s an almshouse stood in its place, developing over the years to become a purposefully formed brick and wood edifice, situated on a tract of land chosen for its beauty, watching over the Brandywine Creek below. It was called the Chester County Poorhouse, the first establishment in Pennsylvania built explicitly by the county to serve its least-fortunate citizens. A task it had strived to do well, offering those without homes a place to try to better themselves, or at the very least, providing a safe place to land for those whose lives were in ruin. The poorhouse aimed to distance itself from the warehouses and shacks that were the expected homes of the impoverished during the late 1700s and early 1800s - It had fresh water, heat, and a fully functioning farm of several hundred acres. A self-sustaining campus that existed within, though wholly detached from the greater county it served.

As the population of the state and county grew, so too did the resident count at the poorhouse. In time the state of Pennsylvania took direct control of the property, and by the early 1900s, the former poorhouse came to be known as the 'State Insane Hospital' of Chester County. The change in title brought with it a broadening of purpose, existing buildings were expanded, new ones were constructed, and the hospital now operated to house not only the financially and socially destitute but also those who were mentally and physically unable to care for themselves.

In the 1950s a wave of modernization swept the campus. Deteriorating buildings were removed to make way for larger, more modern structures and most all of what was the former poorhouse was lost to the plow. In its wake stood the Embreeville State Hospital, a sprawling collection of flat-faced brick structures with few defining characteristics beyond being far more cold and sterile in appearance than the former poorhouse. This dramatic transformation was to be the final form of the state facility and by 1980 it was shuttered, left to rot in the woods for decades.

It was these modern husks that greeted us on a rainy summer day. Given the era in which these wards were built, we found little in the way of the ornate details which commonly adorn older state hospital buildings. In their stead, we found mostly-flat walls of red brick punctuated by repetitive square windows, the few flourishes that did exist were reserved primarily for entryways and bay windows. Still, a style did shine through it all, an unapologetic commitment to form-follows-function, which proved intriguing in its own right. Especially so when all of its angular edges were being relentlessly worn by nature, choked by ivy, and eroded by weather.

The halls and rooms within the former hospital were no less rigid in design than the exterior. The utilitarian design of the hospital was highly focused and rarely deviated - Angular corners and flat walls framed every direction around every turn. Though initially the modern buildings of Embreeville may have seemed less interesting than the more grand designs of historic state hospitals, their simple looks belied a captivating landscape within.

In many places, the years of disuse had become painfully and beautifully, obvious. Everyday items, worthless outside these walls in any monetary sense, became priceless and poignant relics. There was a duality of worlds at play, that which was, and that which is. Within the shuttered Embreeville State Hospital both eras existed simultaneously, a brick-walled time capsule undisturbed except by time itself. That frailness was what made Embreeville so unique - Its life story was on display, fading away more and more with each passing season.

Sometimes the best monument to a place and time is the place itself, left to time.