At the end of the Civil War, the Union Army converted all the medical facilities in the city of Richmond from Confederate to Union control. Union Army General E.R.S. Canby and the Freedman’s Bureau designated an annex of Howard’s Grove Hospital in East Richmond as a temporary state-wide facility for medical, social, and psychiatric care of all newly freed African Americans in the Commonwealth.

 

In December of 1869, General Canby issued General Order 136, transferring responsibility, equipment, and financing for the annexed facility to the State of Virginia. At the time, the annex held “123 insane persons and 100 paupers not insane.” The original site of the hospital was from 20th to 23rd Streets and Fairmount (S. Street) to U Street east of Mechanicville Turnpike.

 

On June 7, 1870 Interim Governor Gilbert Walker and the Legislature passed Chapter 146 of the Acts of the Assembly accepting responsibility and naming the annex the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane. Once efforts to negotiate purchase of the temporary site to build a permanent facility at 20th and Fairmount in Richmond collapsed in 1882, the city of Petersburg gave the Mayfield plantation to the state to build the new Central Lunatic Asylum in Dinwiddie County.

 

In 1882, the legislature approved funding to construct a new facility that opened in 1885 and renamed it Central State Hospital (CSH) in 1894.