A Mountain Built for Care,
Changed by Time

A Short History of Cresson Sanatorium & Prison

The Sanatorium

​

At the beginning of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was one of America's great public health threats. There were no antibiotics capable of curing it. Treatment depended heavily on rest, nutritious food, sunlight, fresh air and separation from others who might become infected.

​

Pennsylvania Health Commissioner Dr. Samuel G. Dixon wanted a state sanatorium in western Pennsylvania. Cresson offered what physicians of the period were looking for: elevation, clean mountain air, open land and distance from crowded industrial communities where tuberculosis spread easily.

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie owned land here. He made property available to the Commonwealth for the new institution, and in January 1913, the Cresson State Sanatorium opened.[1]

Cresson was designed as an institutional community. Patient cottages and wards shared the mountain with schools, dining facilities, recreation buildings, staff residences, agricultural operations, a chapel and a power house. The architecture reflected the medicine of the period. Fresh air was not simply pleasant. It was treatment.[2]

By 1914, more than a thousand people had already been treated here. Many arrived seriously ill. Some recovered and went home. Some remained for years. Some died.[3]

Tuberculosis could dismantle an ordinary life very quickly. A diagnosis might mean leaving children, employment and home for an uncertain period of institutional treatment. Thomas Bell captured that fear in his 1941 novel Out of This Furnace. When his fictional Mary Dobrejcak is told she will probably be sent to Cresson, her immediate concern is who will care for her children.[4]

The scene is fictional. The dilemma was not.

​

Growing Up at Cresson

​

Children occupied an unusual place in Cresson's history because many sent here did not have active tuberculosis.

Some had been exposed to the disease at home or were considered especially vulnerable to developing it. Cresson's Preventorium offered good food, rest, sunshine, education and mountain air in an effort to keep those children healthy.[2]

In 1932, a Children's House opened with 122 beds and nursery space. That building survives today as Building 1, later associated with the name Maple House. When the Children's Department closed in 1950, it was converted to adult use.[1][2]

One remarkable visitor came to the children of Cresson in 1920.

​

Helen Keller visited with her teacher and longtime companion Anne Sullivan Macy through a connection with Pittsburgh philanthropist Mary Copley Thaw, an important supporter of the San. Keller addressed children gathered in the Assembly Room. A photograph of her visit and a surviving version of her speech remain in archival collections.[5]

​

Thaw also helped support Grace Chapel, erected in 1914. For people facing months or years away from home, the chapel became part of life at Cresson.[1][2]

​

Former patient Charles "Chuck" Felton remembered attending services there in the 1950s after his recovery had progressed enough for him to leave bed rest. Felton was seventeen when tuberculosis brought him to Cresson. Decades later, he began recording his memories so his children would understand what had happened to him.[6]

​

Other former patients and employees began contributing their stories, photographs and records. Felton's project grew into an extraordinary collection of Cresson's history, much of which is now preserved by the Cambria Memory Project.[6]

​

Without that work, many of the voices that allow us to understand life here might have disappeared.

​

A Different Kind of Institution

Medicine eventually changed Cresson's purpose. Streptomycin arrived in the 1940s, followed by other increasingly effective tuberculosis drugs. Years of isolation and mountain air were no longer the only weapons available.[1]

​

In 1956, Cresson became Laurence F. Flick State Hospital. Tuberculosis treatment continued during this transitional period, but the traditional sanatorium was disappearing.[1]

​

Then, in 1964, the campus became Cresson State School and Hospital, part of Pennsylvania's residential system for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. During the 1970s it became known as Cresson Center.[1]

​

Residents lived, learned and received services here during a period when American attitudes toward disability and institutionalization were changing dramatically. Across the country, large state institutions were increasingly challenged in favor of civil rights and community-based care.

​

There were tragedies here as well. A fire in February 1973 ultimately claimed the lives of three residents.[7]

​

Nearby Union Cemetery holds another piece of this history. Some Cresson patients whose remains were not claimed by family were buried there. During the 1980s, Pennsylvania First Lady Ginny Thornburgh became involved in efforts to restore and memorialize the cemetery, including an area containing unidentified graves. It was rededicated in 1986.[8]

​

By then, Cresson itself was changing again.

​

From Hospital to Prison

The property transferred to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in 1983. SCI Cresson opened in 1987.[1]

​

The prison reused older institutional buildings while constructing new correctional housing around them. Even a former director's residence was physically moved as the secure boundaries of the property changed, later becoming the prison superintendent's residence.[9]

​

In the 1990s, the larger property also became home to the separate Cresson Secure Treatment Unit, a highly secure facility for adjudicated young men. State custodial use of the mountain had expanded again.[10]

​

SCI Cresson operated for 26 years.

​

Its final years produced one of the site's most difficult documented chapters.

​

In 2011, the United States Department of Justice began investigating conditions at the prison. Federal investigators found prisoners with serious mental illness, including some with intellectual disabilities, confined in extreme isolation for 22 or 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or years. Investigators documented inadequate mental health care, psychological deterioration, self-harm, suicide and excessive force.[11]

​

In 2013, the Justice Department concluded that practices at Cresson violated the Eighth Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The findings prompted a broader investigation of Pennsylvania's correctional system and contributed to subsequent reforms.[11][12]

​

SCI Cresson closed in 2013 for separate operational and financial reasons.

What Remains

After the prison closed, the property passed into private ownership and through several attempts at reuse. Today, Mark Sierens and his family own and operate the historic property, leading preservation efforts while making significant portions of Cresson accessible again.

​

What survives is remarkable because the different eras have not neatly replaced one another.

​

Grace Chapel still stands. So does the Children's House. The old power plant recalls the infrastructure required to sustain hundreds of people on an isolated mountain. Prison housing occupies a landscape originally designed around fresh air, medicine and recovery.

​

Understanding Cresson requires resisting the temptation to blend those histories together.

​

Tuberculosis patients were not state-school residents. Residents with disabilities were not prisoners. Prisoners were not patients. Their reasons for being here and the authority exercised over them were profoundly different.

​

But all of them became part of this place.

​

Thousands of people passed through this mountain for profoundly different reasons, under systems that reflected what America at that moment believed care, treatment, protection, control and punishment should look like.

​

Those systems changed.

​

The people inside them were always people.

​

​

​

References

​

1. Cambria Memory Project. “Cresson Sanatorium Timeline.” Contains the institutional chronology, including Carnegie's land transfer, the 1913 opening, Children's House, Grace Chapel, medical developments, the Flick Hospital transition, Cresson State School and Hospital, Cresson Center and the 1983 transfer to Corrections.
Cresson Sanatorium Timeline https://cambriamemory.org/cresson-sanatorium/cresson-sanatorium-timeline/

​

2. Felton, Charles, collection preserved by the Cambria Memory Project. Cresson San History. Includes historical reports, building histories, architectural plans, annual reports and other material originally assembled through Felton's Cresson Sanatorium research.
Cresson San History collection https://cambriamemory.org/cresson-sanatorium/cresson-san-history/

​

3. Dixon, Samuel G. 1914 Report on the Cresson Sanatorium. Pennsylvania Department of Health. Preserved in the Cambria Memory Project as “History 24: Dr. Dixon 1914 Report on the Cresson Sanatorium.” Listed in the historical collection.

​

4. Bell, Thomas. Out of This Furnace. 1941. The Cresson passage follows the fictional Mary Dobrejcak's tuberculosis diagnosis and anticipated admission to Cresson. Source text supplied directly for this project.

​

5. Keller, Helen. Cresson visit and speech, September 20, 1920. Archival photograph and speech material preserved through the Helen Keller archival collection and reproduced/documented within Charles Felton's Cresson research collection.

​

6. Felton, Charles. Cresson TB Sanatorium Remembered. Felton's former-patient recollections and historical collection. The Cambria Memory Project identifies its Cresson collection as material gathered by Felton and specifically credits his preservation work.
Cambria Memory's Cresson preservation collection https://cambriamemory.org/cresson-sanatorium/cresson-sanatorium-preservation-2/

​

7. Contemporary records concerning the February 15, 1973 Cresson State School and Hospital fire. Bob Nelkin Collection, ACC-PARC records, University of Pittsburgh. Contemporary notes, press material and newspaper reporting were used in establishing the event and fatalities.

​

8. Cambria Memory Project. Union Cemetery and Union Cemetery Re-dedication. Preservation records concerning Cresson-associated burials, the restoration project, Ginny Thornburgh's involvement and the 1986 rededication. The collection catalogs both records.

​

9. “Lawrence Flick State Hospital.” Asylum Projects. Used as a secondary architectural source for later physical alterations and building reuse. Claims from this source were treated as secondary and checked against stronger sources where possible.

​

10. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Cresson Secure Treatment Unit procurement records, Pennsylvania Bulletin. Describes the 50-bed highly secure Cresson facility and the population it was designed to serve.
Pennsylvania Bulletin record https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pabull?file=%2Fsecure%2Fpabulletin%2Fdata%2Fvol26%2F26-25%2Fstate_contract.html

​

11. United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Investigation of the State Correctional Institution at Cresson and Notice of Expanded Investigation, May 31, 2013. Primary federal source for the findings concerning prolonged isolation, mental health care, intellectual disability, self-harm, suicide, force and constitutional/ADA violations.

DOJ Cresson findings announcement https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-pennsylvania-state-prison-s-use-solitary-confinement-violates-rights

​

12. United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections investigation, 2011–2016. DOJ expanded the investigation statewide after its Cresson findings, found related violations across Pennsylvania's prison system in 2014, and closed the investigation in 2016 after significant reforms.
DOJ Pennsylvania investigation summary https://www.justice.gov/crt/special-litigation-section-case-summaries

​

​

​